Dead at 87, Louise Lasser

Magic mountain, Azadeh Nia

banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

The famous red torii gate (Heiwa-no-Torii) of Hakone Shrine in the waters of Lake Ashi.

In this picture, I exposed for the sky to avoid blowing out the bright parts of the clouds and preserving a lot of the details.

This reboot of a 2000 film, based on a script by the great Ingmar Bergman, features some extremely odd camera work and a very strangely written female lead. But it’s frequently bewitching

The film Faithless, a cruel adultery fable directed by Liv Ullmann from a screenplay by the great Ingmar Bergman, was something of a throwback even when it came out in 2000: that sort of sensual dissection of arty middle-class mores was no longer common cinematic currency. Arthouse indulgence hadn’t died out altogether and it still hasn’t today, but, for generations of viewers in 2026 weaned on premium streaming, the lofty waft of the new Faithless TV reboot, adapted from the Bergman scripts by Sara Johnsen and directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), might seem alien.

We’re smoking on planes and wearing corduroy suits in deep maroon: yes, it’s 1977 and, in Stockholm, actor Marianne (Frida Gustavsson) and her pianist husband Markus (August Wittgenstein) are visited by Markus’s oldest friend David (Gustav Lindh), a wannabe film auteur who’s returned from London bruised by his divorce. Episode two introduces a second timeline, in the present, where lauded director David (Jesper Christensen) and veteran performer Marianne (Lena Endre, who was the younger Marianne in the Ullman movie) meet again and reflect on the damage caused by their affair.

Faithless aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now

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• Hossam Hassan’s side beaten after being 2-0 up late on

• ‘They want Messi to stay in the tournament’

Egypt’s manager, Hossam Hassan, has vowed not to watch another minute of the World Cup after feeling his side “suffered an injustice” against Argentina as Lionel Messi inspired a miraculous comeback from two goals down.

Egypt took an early lead through Yasser Ibrahim and thought they had doubled their advantage early in the second half, only for Mostafa Ziko’s goal to be disallowed for a foul by Marwan Attia in the buildup. Ziko made it 2-0 soon after before Cristian Romero pulled one back for Argentina and Messi equalised, in the process scoring his eighth goal of the tournament and 21st in the World Cup.

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The suspension of the USA striker’s red card after Trump’s intervention has shown what Gianni Infantino’s organisation is trying to turn the sport into: scripted entertainment

Frites 4 Cheats 1. Tintin 4 Tonto 1. Some good news here, perhaps. It seems Gianni Infantino was right after all. Football has united the world. Mainly football has united the world in gleeful satisfaction at the USA exiting its own World Cup tournament as soon as possible following the great and glorious Donald Trump Mr-Fix-It intervention.

This was the tone of the immediate global reaction to the USA’s invertebrate defeat in Seattle on Monday night, soundly beaten by a righteous and highly motivated Belgium: land of beer, waffles and sporting vigilante justice. Ghent 4 Bent 1. Antwerp 4 A twerp 1. Mayonnaise 4 May-have-interfered-in-due-process 1. I can go on. How long have you got?

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Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees over a bank-owned network, however. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Capital One Financial bought Discover Financial in a $50.6 billion deal, it got a network that cut out the need for a middleman in card transactions and allowed it to deal more directly with merchants. Now, big banks are looking on with envy because owning a network can mean exemption from a federal law that caps debit-card fees. Those fees collectively amount to billions of dollars each year across the industry, but banks have long complained the government-defined cap limits their ability to offer customers debit-card rewards and other services. Some have been exploring a small deal that could upend the rules, though they are worried about political backlash if they try.

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Your Windows is watching you. The US Justice Department's complaint against Peter Stokes for alleged involvement in the Scattered Spider hacking group offers a reminder that it's difficult to hide online activity from Microsoft's operating system (or any other). Scattered Spider, according to US authorities, targeted numerous companies in the US by compromising employee accounts in order to access more than 100 corporate networks and exfiltrate or encrypt data that would be ransomed for payment. The group is said to have obtained over $100 million in ransom payments. The complaint, arrest, and extradition of Stokes relied in part on a Microsoft Windows Global Device Identifier (GDID), among other telemetry records, to link online activity to the suspect. "According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," explained FBI special agent Ali Sadiq in an affidavit accompanying the DOJ's criminal complaint. The court filing also notes that Microsoft made criminal referrals to the DOJ implicating Stokes. It points to an October 2024 referral that cites online service telemetry that company security researchers believe linked Stokes to other hacking group members. Social media posts relevant to Scattered Spider, supposedly sent and received by Stokes, look unlikely to help his defense. The affidavit says that members of Scattered Spider used a web tunneling tool called ngrok to avoid network barriers and maintain access to compromised servers, as well as a VPN service called Tzulo. Investigators obtained IP address records from ngrok and the VPN provider and then obtained records from Microsoft that matched the time when that ngrok account had been set up on a Windows machine through a specific GDID. "According to Microsoft records, on or about May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC – when, according to ngrok records, the ngrok account was created – the device with the GDID accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard.ngrok.com/signup,' the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account," the affidavit explains. Microsoft's GDID records also showed that the Windows device with that GDID accessed Tzulo servers assigned to the IP address identified by ngrok. And the GDID was subsequently linked to an IP address in Estonia where Stokes resided. The Windows GDID, or at least the infrastructure for it, is said to date back to the release of Windows 10 in 2015. The GDID itself doesn't show up much in online documentation until 2021 or thereabouts. According to a developer writeup posted to GitHub, wlidsvc (Microsoft Account service) provisions the device with login.live.com and gets back a device PUID. The identifier is then stored in the registry. The Connected Devices Platform (cdp.dll / CDPSvc) reads it and registers it into the Device Directory Service (DDS) graph. And after that, Delivery Optimization reports it as the documented UCDOStatus.GlobalDeviceId. Apple maintains similar identifiers, including a hardware UUID and a DSID (Destination Signaling Identifier) [PDF] tied to iCloud, among others. Linux also supports a machine-id. And when presented with a lawful demand for information, most service providers will cooperate and provide whatever information they store. ®