Schrödinger's Cat, the famous 1935 thought experiment, imagines a cat that, for reasons rooted in quantum physics we need not dwell on here, is simultaneously alive and dead. In a landscape of relentless cyberattacks and mounting infrastructural complexity, a routine backup task can appear finished, with every box ticked and every check made. The job is not actually done, however, until it has been verified as fully ready for recovery in the event of cyber disaster. A task that looks sorted can turn out, under scrutiny, to be anything but. A backup can be logged as 'complete' once data has been copied to storage, but a recoverable workload is another matter entirely. It means that when a business goes down, its workloads can be restored to their state at the point of attack with nothing lost. By the time you realize you are on the wrong side of that ambiguity, it may be too late: your data is in the hands of the bad guys, or destroyed, and this time the cat really is dead. This is not a problem to which IT bosses and managed service provider (MSP) management are entirely oblivious. Most organizations recognize to some degree that their backup may not be 100 percent watertight. Cybersecurity management specialist Kaseya recently partnered with 1105 Media to survey 200 IT professionals about the realities shaping cyber resilience planning. Some 53 percent were no more than 'somewhat confident' in their organization's ability to fully recover from a ransomware attack, and admitted their backups were supported by no better than 'limited testing'. A significant proportion had even less faith in their recovery capabilities, while only 15 percent were 'very confident' they could get back on track with no loss. Verify and survive Understanding what a verified backup means, and what role verification plays in the recovery challenge weighing on so many IT leaders, is where any sensible resilience plan begins. Backups are vital but they do not guarantee recovery on their own. What matters is confirming that a backup job will hold up in a disaster. Verification is the process of proving that backed-up data is complete, uncorrupted, and fully restorable in an emergency, offering evidence that recovery is possible during a critical outage, hardware failure or ransomware attack. It is essential whether you run an IT department or an MSP responsible for client protection: unless you can prove clients are protected, there is every chance they are not. "Backup isn't done and entrustable until you've gone in and made sure that the application actually works and can be brought back to the recovery environment," explains Brent Torre, GM of cyber resilience at Kaseya. "Historically, it's just taken too much time and resource for a lot of people to even attempt that. And where they have been verifying, they haven't been doing it regularly enough to ensure real protection." Not all approaches to verification are of equal value. IT departments still relying on intermittent manual verification are operating on blind trust: warnings thrown up by the process can be misread, failures overlooked, and the result is a dangerous mix of false negatives that waste time and false positives that expose the organization to real risk. Manual screenshot verification is a proven way to squander a security budget , tying up highly qualified staff on needless work and pulling their expertise away from where it is genuinely needed. Nobody wants seasoned engineers spending hours reviewing screenshots, second-guessing outputs and trying to determine whether a backup worked. Where static verification methods once had a place, today's complex IT ecosystems have made them redundant. Across an estate spanning in-house systems, SaaS and cloud endpoints, basic verification cannot cope, picking up only surface-level signals and lacking the design to operate at scale. At scale, the inefficiencies of manual verification multiply and response times slow to a crawl. A minor inefficiency can quietly become a serious bottleneck without anyone noticing, and legacy methods can create the illusion that everything is working perfectly while catastrophe waits around the corner. As Torre points out, light-touch checking is unlikely to satisfy the ever-increasing regulatory burden around recovery and resilience. "Some compliance frameworks explicitly state that you must test recovery on a frequent basis," he says. "It's becoming more important than ever that organisations are able to do that." Let AI handle the heat The emerging gold standard is AI-powered screenshot verification, which replaces the best-efforts manual checking of overstretched human teams. It works by automatically booting up virtualized backups, capturing a screenshot and analyzing the image to confirm the backup ran correctly. Where rigid, rule-based checks fall short, context-aware visual AI combined with OCR accurately identifies login screens, dashboards and maintenance states, and evaluates every element with precision. The result is 99.9 percent verification accuracy and sharply reduced false positives, alongside far greater confidence in every backup. This is welcome news for IT managers facing budget shortfalls and a drought of experienced talent, and it is what MSPs need as they try to make the economics of recovery stack up. Remove the manual effort and the constant checking of false alarms, and the gains mount quickly. Human teams are free for higher-value work, SLA confidence rises, customer trust improves, and environments can scale without ballooning overheads. AI-powered verification is no longer a maybe for today's MSPs; it is the only route forward that makes sense on the P&L. The good news is that AI-powered screenshot verification does not require major up-front investment or deep internal expertise. Datto, the cybersecurity and data protection outfit owned by Kaseya, has built the latest verification technology directly into its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) platform, so that deployment stays simple and disruption to existing workflows is minimal. This kind of AI-powered screenshot verification is designed to strip uncertainty out of the process and give IT teams confidence that backed-up data is complete and recoverable. The ideal solution does so at scale, and without adding complexity, by working within the workflows already in place. With Datto there is the further option of integrating remote monitoring and management (RMM) with the BCDR product, which enables proactive remediation through automated deployments, the merging of backup health with endpoint alerts, and virtual restores launched directly from a single management console. "It's key to have context and visibility into the backup estate through your RMM so you know that you are up to date on patching, on antivirus definitions and backups," says Torre. "With all of that integrated within the RMM solution, you have the ability to understand your risk profile across the fleet in terms of protection. You know in the event that something needs to be recovered. And you can start a backup-initiated recovery directly from the RMM platform." The gold standard to aim for, he concludes, is continuous validation and automated remediation, not the ability to look in now and again to see what is going on. The perfect verification solution , he adds, should be 'impossibly easy to use', requiring humans to exert zero cognitive effort on backup beyond deploying a new client and initiating a recovery. By giving yourself the means to distinguish between a completed backup job and a recoverable workload, you have set yourself apart from the kind of IT manager or MSP who only spots a problem after something has gone wrong. By deploying AI-powered verification, you stop treating backup as a probability and start treating it as a proof. You know what you have. Then when something goes wrong, and it will, that certainty is the only thing standing between a fast recovery and a very long night. MSPs looking to unify backup and security into a single resilience practice can start with the When Backup Meets Security in the MSP Stack whitepaper. Sponsored by Datto.

TMZ reports that voice actor Peter Cullen, famously the voice of Optimus Prime, has passed away at 85.

Mona Keijzer kondigde Project 2029 aan, een mogelijk nieuwe rechtse partij. Maar rechts van de VVD is het druk, en de meeste partijen mislukken. De vier zwaktes van uiterst rechtse partijen.

DirtyGlassEye has added a photo to the pool:

Since I'm about to head back here, there's no real need to post a Tokyo shot, but this a selling point I want to make more prominent on my site so I'll take another advantage when it comes. I was deep in Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden with pouring rain. I had so many long paths that I could use for compression but there was always people or cars coming by, oftentimes I would wait before giving up. This was before I even had an editing software picked out so I didn't know what I could rely on for editing while I was out here.
Eventually I did get one but most of my other shots here aren't usable. In fact, there's a reason why this one took so long to get out. The fence was only on one side of the street and for a long time I didn't know how I wanted to fix this photo but only that I wanted to do it. On top of that, this wasn't taken with my heavy 200mm (which I DID have on me at that time), so how could I make it look like a tunnel/leading line. This took 3 separate tries this past year to finally pull off. I distorted the shot and cloned the fence on the opposite side, then cut down the exposure on the trees and sky with the exception of the clearing directly in front of me, keeping the vanishing point. I scaled the street up so it would have more space and kept the brightness on the shimmering in the street, not enough to get a reflection but it still adds to the photo immensely.
Truthfully, I don't know how many nature shots I'm gonna get when I return to Japan next month. I'm not going to do as much large scale traveling, heck, you may not even see Fuji (though in reality that's just つゆ, there's gonna be even more overcast. I don't think I've groaned harder in my entire career as DirtyGlassEye). But you know me, I will do my best.

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The transfer window isn’t an actual window, of course. In reality, it’s a large collection of different windows, with each club having one of their own, through which they peer longingly, occasionally flinging large quantities of cash money out of them like half-cut sailors on a ship coming into dock, and they’re all in various states of disrepair. For example, Tottenham have only recently prised theirs open – the previous occupant, Mr Levy, had deliberately painted over the seals – and all summer it’s been flapping in the breeze like the screen door of a haunted house. Manchester City meanwhile have removed the glass from their frames altogether, allowing the free movement of large expensive items safely through it in both directions. There are some officious-looking gentlemen with clipboards currently double-checking the structural integrity of that one. They say they’ll get back to us.

I see that after disappointing at Man City, Savinho changed his name to Sávio, and then scored on his debut for Spurs. In the hope that the same trick works for me, in terms of improving my strike rate in getting letters to Football Daily published, I’m changing my name to Noble Francis” – Phil Taverner.

One of my very favourite things in modern football is to see players for billion-dollar teams in billion-dollar stadiums ‘giving it large’ after scoring against lower-league opposition, following a humiliating loss in a derby game (yes, I know it’s Brentford, but it still counts as a derby) – Noble Francis.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. 

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Burnham has nothing to hide as he prepares to meet president he once called poisonous. It may actually win him more respect

It makes a pleasant change. Not so long ago, Keir Starmer was falling over himself in his efforts to keep things sweet with Donald Trump. Offering the US president a second state visit within minutes of meeting him. Everyone knows you should never put out on the first date: it only makes the other person think you’re a pushover. Sure enough, The Donald banked the marching bands and the Windsor silver service, made polite conversation for three days and then went back to trash-talking him.

Yet still, Starmer just sat there and took it. As if one word of criticism would be too much. Wittering on about the “special relationship” as if Trump gave a moment’s thought to the UK before he did anything. The rest of us wouldn’t have put money on the US president even being able to locate Britain on a map. It was only latterly, when The Donald chose to bomb Iran, that the penny finally dropped for Keir. And even then he looked pained by the apparent betrayal, as he resisted the calls of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to join in the war.

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Romania ordered the expulsion of a Russian diplomat last month following a series of airspace violations involving drones.

In Capelle aan den IJssel is alweer een Aziatische tijgermug opgedoken. Een week geleden, op 19 augustus, werd het insect gevonden in de buurt Paradijssel. In die wijk werd eind juli ook al een tijgermug gesignaleerd.

When I was about 10 years old, my parents organized a vacation to a tiny enclave called Orr Hot Springs just outside of Ukiah, California. Nestled in the mountains with a history dating to 1858 as a stagecoach stop with redwoods shading the trails, the property has a uniquely layered architectural history. We stayed in what my dad called “Art’s cabin,” which turned out to have really been built by a guy named Art in the mid-1970s. A giant tree intersected the middle of the structure.

Art’s cabin is one of few remaining buildings from the property’s back-to-the-land era, before it became today’s modern resort. In 1974, my dad and a group of friends from Berkeley teamed up to buy the hot springs. Over time, a small community developed as people purchased “shares” in the property. Attracted by the cooperative nature of the place and the opportunity to escape the city, people came and went, sometimes staying for a couple of weeks and sometimes for a couple of years. To make income, my dad recalls leading week-long carpentry courses, during which visitors and community members alike constructed what he describes as tiny, “very not-code” cabins, some of which were finished and actually lived in for a time. There was a buzz around building.

As my dad and I both paged through my hot-off-the-press copy of Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California, I could tell that a lot jogged his memory. I grew up hearing stories about the ups and downs of running an intentional community in the hills during the 1970s, and his experience is but one among many thousands. Having also lived in Humboldt County for a time myself, I enjoy the striking sense of continuity throughout the past five decades that author David Jacob Kramer and photographer Michael Schmelling capture in this hefty tome. The work represents a counterculture that, though changed, is still alive and well.

The vernacular of Northern California architecture in the late 1960s and 1970s is a result of resourcefulness, timeliness, and a staunch desire to do things one’s own way. Scrounging for discarded redwood left over by the region’s logging industry and salvaging architectural details and appliances from historical homes, the houses cover a broad range of styles. Think triangular windows, diagonal paneling, cylindrical or octagonal footprints, and ad hoc additions.

Often, builders had no plan, constructing their dwellings to whatever standard they were able. They used plastic to cover windows and sometimes innovated with compositing toilet solutions or solar. The buildings were hardly ever up to code, and many lived with the constant anxiety that their homes could be condemned and they’d be evicted by local authorities. But the risk outweighed an alternative that felt too limiting or oppressive. “In pursuit of something better, back-to-the-landers radically reappraised what a home could and should be—and how it might inform the lives of its inhabitants,” Kramer says in the introductory essay.

Some homes of the era draw their inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome design, while others take cues from neolithic forms or Indigenous structures around the world. Many examples of these were published contemporaneously in popular books like Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter, which itself was a spinoff of his editorial contributions to Stewart Brand’s counterculture magazine, Whole Earth Catalog. The legendary publication described itself as an “access device” that served as a kind of ultimate peer-to-peer DIY guide for living and building.

My first impression of Handmade Utopia was that it felt like a kind of reverent extension of Barry Shapiro and Art Boericke’s seminal 1973 photo book Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art. By comparison, this fresh look at the stylistic movement is a more personal expression of wonder and fondness for not only a particular style of architecture but the societal complexities that spawned it.

Kramer and Schmelling adventured through the NorCal countryside over the course of four years to touch base with people who still make their homes in the woods. Even those who no longer live in their decades-old dwellings can retrace their steps to see what remains. And the foundation of every one is composed of ingenuity and independent spirit. In addition to thoughtful introductory texts, the bulk of the book is chock full of photographs, archival material, and anecdotes by the folks whose structures the authors visit.

Rather than a comprehensive study of hand-built Northern California architecture, Handmade Utopia reads more like an homage to what Kramer calls the “audacious hope” of the back-to-the-land movement. And this hope isn’t relegated to its historical roots, as young people today are confronted by the prohibitive cost of both homes and land. “Schmelling and I felt an urgency in capturing these homes before they literally went back-to-the-land, disappearing along with the generation who built them,” Kramer says.

Handmade Utopia is officially slated for release on September 1. Find your copy in the Colossal Shop. You might also enjoy a tour of Ricky Boscarino’s whimiscal hand-built home in New Jersey or Matt Bua’s “repurposed city” in Upstate New York.

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 ‘Handmade Utopia’ Relishes the Architecture of California’s Back-to-the-Land Movement appeared first on Colossal.