Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Wow. De overname van het bedrijf Solvinity, dat ONZE DigiD-beheert, door het Amerikaanse bedrijf Kyndryl GAAT NIET DOOR. Dat schrijft de staatssecretaris van Economische Zaken aan de Tweede Kamer. Die is al tijden tegen die overname omdat het zeg maar best wel een privacy-dingetje is om zulke essentiële digitale infrastructuur compleet in buitenlandse handen te laten vallen. "Het BTI (Bureau Toetsing Investeringen, GS) heeft op 21 november 2025 een melding ontvangen van de voorgenomen koper (Kyndryl) en besloten een onderzoek in te stellen conform de WOZT. Door BTI is geconcludeerd dat deze beoogde overname van Solvinity mogelijk een risico vormt voor het publieke belang op basis van toetsing aan de wettelijke criteria in de WOZT. Het BTI heeft mij geadviseerd om over te gaan tot een volledig verbod van deze overname. Dit advies heb ik mij eigen gemaakt en heb ik overgenomen."
PS Super handig, een ministerie dat dit nieuws gewoon meldt via X
DEN HAAG (ANP) - De overname van het bedrijf achter DigiD (Solvinity) door het Amerikaanse Kyndryl wordt door staatssecretaris Willemijn Aerdts (Economische Zaken) verboden. Ze doet dat op advies van het Bureau Toetsing Investeringen (BTI).
Het BTI concludeert "dat deze beoogde overname van Solvinity mogelijk een risico vormt voor het publieke belang", schrijft de bewindsvrouw aan de Tweede Kamer, waar een meerderheid zich verzette tegen de overname.
De VS en Iran zijn dicht bij een akkoord. Het enige wat nog ontbreekt is een akkoord.
De Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Marco Rubio. “De oorlog zal snel voorbij zijn. We hoeven het alleen nog maar eens te worden.”
Iran spreekt over het gladstrijken van de laatste plooien: "We moeten nog tot een overeenstemming komen. Verder zijn we er uit."
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I never dreamed it would be so hard to put together a playlist for my friend’s 60th
For any birthday party with a zero at the end, the music is supposed to be very simple: you just pick a banger from the year the person was born and work towards to the present day on that basis. Some people are bound to be unlucky. I myself am the victim of a freak event as in 1973, no good songs were released anywhere in the world. But mostly it works on all kinds of levels, because it means that in the early part of the night it’ll be songs that your parents liked, as that’s how you came to be born in the first place, and for the music that was released last year and of which you are entirely unaware, it’ll be the end of the night, and you won’t care.
This is all great until you’re making a playlist for your dear friend who is 60. Even Claude AI was whining about the sheer size of this dataset. The parents would prefer a tea the day before and no longer want to go to a party, so the whole first two decades are playing to no one. (That’s actually unfair: everyone likes the Beatles. But the number of years in which the hit was something Ernie-the-Fastest-Milkman-in-the-West-adjacent is truly shocking.) Realistically, all your favourite songs were released in the same year, which is 1989. If you took a long, hard look in the mirror, you’d admit that you haven’t kept on top of the charts for roughly 20 years, and could no more distinguish early from late Beyoncé than you could correctly identify Mesolithic from Neolithic by looking at a stone tool. The songs you genuinely like definitely did not chart, and it would be antisocial to expect people to join you in knowing all the words; instead, looking for the crowd-pleasers, there’s a whole segment in the middle when you might as well be listening to Magic FM.
Continue reading...The content creators behind channels like Chloe VS History are using AI tools to ‘bring history to life in a really visceral way’
“I have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536,” a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the camera. “I’m going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market. Then, later I am meeting the actual king – yep, Henry VIII – in person.”
On YouTube and other social platforms, users are flocking to watch AI-generated “history influencers”, characters that vlog their travels to historical settings.
Continue reading...From Paris to Mexico, Leonora Carrington’s extraordinary life is retold with intelligence and restraint, though not quite enough imagination
At the age of 20, debutante Leonora Carrington ran away from London to be an artist in Paris, living with the surrealist Max Ernst, who was married and more than twice her age. But you won’t notice the uncomfortable age gap in this biopic, in which Carrington is played by Olivia Vinall, who is in her late 30s and portrays the artist for a decade or so, from Paris until Carrington settled in Mexico in the 1940s. Vinall’s performance is pleasingly spiky, fierce and uncompromising, fit for a woman who did not seek anyone’s approval – and does some heavy lifting in this otherwise tepid film.
It’s adapted from a biographical novel by Elena Poniatowska. We meet Carrington arriving in Paris, where she discovers that the surrealists’ circle is another male-dominated world, with its own objectionable attitudes to women. Carrington, though, gives short shrift to men such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí, drivelling on about woman as the divine muse to be worshipped. The dialogue clunks along unconvincingly, such as one line spoken to Ernst (Alexander Scheer): “I don’t want to be your wife. I want to be your lover.” The pair move to southern France, where they seem to work productively – portrayed in slightly dull scenes – until the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, when Ernst, a German citizen, is imprisoned.
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