In a remake-riddled TV landscape, its fresh combination of jokes and intrigue offers something for everyone – the casual and obsessive viewer alike

In the last few weeks, you may have been seeing a lot of buzz around a show called Widow’s Bay. I am here to provide more buzz, like a loyal bee foot soldier to the queen (television).

In this dire existing-IP-driven remake-riddled landscape, an offering this fresh is the best thing in the world. The tone of the show is what has grabbed me the most, striking the exact right balance (in my correct opinion) between scary mystery vibes, and hilarious comedy. At no point does it sacrifice comedy for the more serious parts, and I really appreciate that. For example, in the penultimate, thrilling, everything’s-about-to-happen episode, they slow down for an eight-minute scene involving a side character named Rosemary, which moves the plot forward slightly but is mainly there to shine a light on the incredible comedy chops of actor Dale Dickey.

Continue reading...

Pictures from photographer’s return to Lacock after 40 years were taken months before his death last December

The images are colourful, characterful and thought-provoking. They capture a flower show, a Women’s Institute meeting, a scarecrow festival. A local vicar features, resplendent in a union jack bowler hat, as does a band of bellringers and a bulldog called Billy.

Four decades after chronicling life in the picture-postcard English village of Lacock in Wiltshire, the photographer Martin Parr returned to document what had changed – and what had not.

Continue reading...

Top 10% generate climate and biodiversity damage bill that exceeds economies of most countries, say researchers

The environmental damage bill racked up by the highest-consuming 10% of the world’s population has reached up to $5.7tn a year – larger than the economy of every country except the US and China, a study has found.

Mega-consumers in this group are concentrated in the global north, accounting for more than half the population of the US and 40-45% of people in the EU.

Continue reading...

A decade in the making, the museum will reopen in November in two restored market halls with displays and late-night DJ sets

The new London Museum will be “a social space for the city”, its director has said, hosting afternoon tea events, monthly dinner clubs and late-night DJ sets where visitors can mingle among the artefacts while dancing.

Sharon Ament said that when it reopened later this year the museum would be a “democratic” space that engaged with all Londoners rather than merely a repository for its collections, which stretch from the city’s neolithic prehistory to modern acquisitions.

Continue reading...

EXCLUSIVE Google has a security hole in a Kubernetes operator that could allow attackers to bypass Google Cloud Platform (GCP) identity and access protections and gain full control over any organization's cloud environment. Or it has a serious communication and transparency problem when it comes to its bug bounty programs. Maybe both. Researcher and frequent cloud bug hunter Justin O'Leary told us that he found and reported to Google a major flaw that allows any Kubernetes namespace user to bypass GCP's Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls and therefore gain root access to managing an organization's cloud resources. Google initially rated the bug high priority and high severity, with a rep telling O'Leary "Nice Catch!" Then, the cloud giant changed course and told O'Leary and The Register that there's no vulnerability, so no fix and no reward payout. The bug report, however, is still marked high-priority and accepted. O'Leary spoke exclusively with The Register about the vulnerability, which he named ConfigConfusion, and what has happened since he reported it to Google on March 8. He is also releasing a blog post with more details. It stems from an issue in Config Connector, an open source Kubernetes add-on that lets users manage Google Cloud resources through Kubernetes. According to O'Leary, Config Connector doesn't perform an authorization check, and this allows any Config Connector service account with org-level permissions to bypass Identity and Access Management (IAM) authorization and gain the highest level of control (roles/owner) to an entire GCP Organization – the root node of all of a company's resources within Google Cloud. On March 27, a Google security engineer accepted O'Leary's report and told him: "Nice catch!" The employee said that they filed a bug based on O'Leary's report with the relevant product team and assured him the Chocolate Factory's security squad would work with relevant Google Cloud people to fix the flaw. "We'll work with the product team to ensure this issue is address. We'll let you know when the issue was fixed," the engineer said. "In the meantime, review the payment option selected in your bughunters.google.com profile." Google assigned the bug P1 priority and S1 severity, signifying a flaw worthy of urgent repair because it affects a large percentage of users and can disrupt core organizational functions. "I figured that was the end of that," O'Leary said in a phone interview with The Register. Eleven days later, on April 7, he received a new message from a Google Security Bot reversing the earlier decision. The Reg viewed the email, and O'Leary included a screenshot in his Thursday writeup. The message said that the Cloud Vulnerability Reward Program panel decided that the "security impact of this issue does not meet the criteria to qualify for a reward." After reviewing the bug report, Google determined the software "is working as intended," the message continued. It also noted that the program's decision not to pay a bounty "does not mean that the product team won't fix the issue." Nearly three months later, the case remains P1/S1 with the status "in progress (accepted)." Google hasn't assigned a CVE or issued a fix. O'Leary didn't receive any reward for his research. This isn't the first time this has happened to O'Leary – or other security researchers submitting bug bounty reports. O'Leary had a similar experience with Microsoft earlier this year. In a story that has become all too familiar among bug hunters, O'Leary disclosed a privilege escalation vulnerability in Azure Backup for AKS. Microsoft rejected his report – and then silently patched the flaw without assigning a CVE or publishing a security advisory. "This is a pattern," O'Leary told us. "This is just how these trillion-dollar companies deal with people like me. In my day job, we use GKE, and it's incredibly frustrating on my end, when I find a critical vulnerability in the system that's being widely used, and I can't even get the vendor to patch their own stuff." Google's response When The Reg asked Google about O'Leary's situation, the company told us that it didn't issue a bug bounty reward because there's no vulnerability. “The issue reported does not qualify for a reward because the GCP IAM authorization bypass is only exploitable if an attacker has access to a Config Connector Service Account that’s been granted the Organization Admin role by the organization (i.e., it is privileged)," a Google spokesperson said in an email to The Register. "Additionally, an attacker would first need to gain entry to an organization's environment (e.g., an exposed container) in order to leverage the privileged Config Connector instance and execute commands with administrative authority, such as the IAM bypass," the spokesperson continued. "Granting this level of access to the Config Connector Service Account goes against Google Cloud’s publicly shared best practices and the principle of least privilege." Google did not answer The Register's questions about why the bug report case remains marked in progress – and not closed – on its end of things. O'Leary told us this is the same explanation he received. And he doesn't buy it. Yes, the Config Connector service account does need org-level permissions to manage resources across multiple GKE clusters. But Google's own documentation instructs users how to do this, he noted. We confirmed this as well. Moreover, "having those permissions doesn't mean any namespace user should be able to abuse them," O'Leary posited. "A developer with kubectl access to one namespace – and zero GCP IAM permissions – should not be able to become Organization Owner. They also shouldn't be able to impersonate any service account in the project with no audit trail." According to O'Leary: "The vulnerability is the missing authorization check. Config Connector executes privileged operations on behalf of users without verifying those users are authorized." Three lines, five seconds, full admin control In a video demonstrating ConfigConfusion, O'Leary shows how an attacker can write three lines of YAML to achieve full administrative control of a GCP Organization in about five seconds. "Config Connector has these missing validation checks," he said. "Config Connector is basically a Google-managed Kubernetes operator, and I found that having these missing validation checks creates these confused deputies, which means there's no validation of who's asking for what." Confused deputies pose a major security challenge because they allow an entity that doesn't have permission to perform an action to force a more-privileged entity to perform the action. To exploit this issue, a user with kubectl access to one namespace – and no GCP permissions – submits a malicious IAMPolicyMember, which escalates the attacker's privileges. Config Connector passes the user-controlled organization ID directly to the GCP IAM API without performing an authorization check, making the user a GCP Organization owner. This gives the attacker full admin control over everything in the environment – projects, secrets, billing, and Gmail accounts. "And there's no record of it," O'Leary said. This is because "the attacker's Kubernetes identity never touches GCP IAM," he wrote in the disclosure. "Config Connector executes the request using its own elevated credentials." 'Jenga' vulnerabilities According to O'Leary, Google has fixed this confused-deputy issue twice before in different services that access GCP. Tenable Research documented those issues and reported them to Google. One, called ImageRunner, abused permissions in Google Cloud Run to pull private Google Artifact Registry and Google Container Registry images in the same account. The second, ConfusedComposer, allowed an identity with edit permissions inside a Cloud Composer environment to escalate privileges to the default Cloud Build service account. "This privilege-escalation vulnerability in GCP builds upon a broader attack class of vulnerabilities in cloud services that we call 'Jenga,'" Tenable security researcher Liv Matan said at the time. ConfusedComposer "exploits the somewhat-hidden cloud provider misconfigurations related to cloud services permissions to escalate privileges beyond intended access levels," Matan explained. "This variant highlights how attackers can abuse interconnected services the cloud provider automatically deploys behind the scenes, as part of a service-orchestration process." Google ultimately added authorization checks to both Cloud Run and Cloud Composer. O'Leary says he doesn't understand why Google can't also add that check to Config Connector. Or perhaps he does. "It's just me versus Google," he said. "They can't do that same level of gaslighting to Tenable because they have PR teams and legal teams to fight them. I'm just a guy saying I don't understand how this is true" – that is, how something can be both a high-severity, high-priority bug and also working as intended. "And they just say: 'Well, it is true.'" ®

When enterprises first began building AI strategies, the default assumption was straightforward: AI would run in the hyperscaler cloud. The APIs were ready, GPU capacity was building out, and the inertia of a decade of public cloud investment pointed in one direction. Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report finds that, as enterprises move to scale, the direction has changed. The Private Cloud Outlook 2026: The AI Tipping Point draws on a blind, global survey of 1,800 senior IT leaders across eight countries. Now in its second year, the report tracks a shift in cloud strategy that is no longer something on the horizon, but one already showing up in production workloads, capital budgets, and board-level priorities. Enterprise AI has found its infrastructure home in private cloud. Production AI is moving to private cloud Last year, 56 percent of enterprises used public cloud as the primary environment for production AI inference. This year, that figure has fallen 15 percentage points to 41 percent, while 56 percent of enterprises are now running or planning to run production inferencing in a private cloud. The shift goes deeper than the top-line numbers. Forty-three percent of enterprises actively repatriating workloads are moving AI training, large language models, and inference out of the public cloud, a category that did not exist in last year's study. The broader repatriation trend has accelerated sharply as well: 83 percent of enterprises are now considering repatriation , up from 69 percent in 2025, and half have already moved at least some workloads, a 15-point jump in a single year. The forces driving enterprise AI to private cloud are the same ones that pulled storage, security-sensitive applications, and regulated data there before it. Security, control, cost, and governance did not become more important because of AI, but the consequences of getting them wrong became much harder to absorb at production scale. When IT leaders place workloads, those classified as high-security, latency sensitive, business critical, or data-intensive consistently land in private cloud. The bill for AI infrastructure has arrived For the first time in this study, cost has overtaken security as the top concern about public cloud. That reflects a familiar reality for enterprise IT leaders: public cloud costs were already difficult to forecast and manage, and AI workloads have made that problem substantially worse. Nearly all IT leaders surveyed (97 percent) believe some portion of their public cloud spend is wasted, and more than half (52 percent) say that waste exceeds 25 percent of their total spending. Generative AI and agentic workloads are compounding the pressure, with 62 percent of IT leaders reporting that they are very or extremely concerned about AI infrastructure costs. Enterprises are revising their investment strategies accordingly. Net intent to increase private cloud investment over three years has risen from 51 percent to 72 percent, and private cloud investment is now growing at more than twice the rate of public cloud. Cost predictability has become the second biggest driver of that shift, cited by 39 percent of organizations. Enterprises that built AI ambitions on variable, consumption-based public cloud pricing are recalculating. Private cloud, with its predictable economics and direct IT control over infrastructure, is increasingly where the budget decisions are landing. Sovereignty has become a board-level priority Geopolitics has moved squarely into the infrastructure conversation. Eighty-six percent of IT leaders say geopolitical and regulatory factors are now directly affecting their IT strategy and operations. Data sovereignty and residency requirements are the top concern, cited by 54 percent of respondents, followed by jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements at 51 percent. For enterprises operating across borders, decisions about where data lives carry direct implications for where workloads can run. AI workloads that process sensitive, regulated, or proprietary data require infrastructure that provides governance and control from the ground up. Security and compliance remain the single most important factor in workload placement decisions, cited by 32 percent of respondents. AI is adding new obligations on top of existing ones: data protection and privacy (37 percent) and security and control (36 percent) are now the leading infrastructure requirements that AI imposes. Private cloud provides the governance architecture to meet those requirements by design, built in from the start rather than bolted on after deployment. Complexity is a platform problem Running production AI at enterprise scale is an operations challenge as much as an infrastructure one. The top skills gap cited by IT leaders is AI infrastructure and operations, named by 40 percent of respondents, followed by cloud security operations at 38 percent and Kubernetes operations at 37 percent. To close that gap, 81 percent of enterprises now fully outsource or use professional services for their cloud-related needs. Operational simplification matters as much as picking the right technology partners. Enterprises that standardize on a unified, well-governed private cloud platform address the AI skills challenge with fewer specialists, less operational fragmentation, and clearer organizational accountability. A platform-centric approach reduces the surface area that teams have to manage, and that is where the real operational gains lie. The tipping point is here The Private Cloud Outlook 2026 confirms what the data has been building toward for two years. Enterprise IT has reached the AI tipping point, and private cloud is the preferred platform for production AI because it addresses what AI at scale demands: security, cost predictability, data sovereignty, and governance that enterprises cannot treat as optional. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is built for this environment. It provides a unified platform for running AI and traditional workloads together, with the performance, cost controls, and security capabilities that production AI at enterprise scale requires. The research shows where enterprise AI is heading, and VMware Cloud Foundation is the platform built to get organizations there. Read the full Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report: https://www.vmware.com/docs/private-cloud-outlook-2026 Contributed by Broadcom.

VVD, CDA, D66, JA21 en Groep Markuszower willen het vrije internet, het vrije woord en de vrije liefde KAPOT maken, en dat allemaal omdat het aantal soa's tussen 2014 en 2025 verdrievoudigde, en dat (mogelijk, misschien, geen idee) allemaal omdat influencers de hele dag krankzinnige dingen roepen over seks en anticonceptie, en dat allemaal omdat uw puberkroost ontvankelijk is voor dergelijke onzin, en dat allemaal omdat ze dankzij gebrekkig onderwijs niet zelf kunnen nadenken, en dat allemaal omdat de regering al decennia onvoldoende investeert in datzelfde onderwijs, en dat allemaal zodat ze dan in 2026 "influencers" die "medische misinformatie" verspreiden kunnen vervolgen, en dat allemaal omdat ze stiekem hopen dat ze op deze manier eindelijk Gideon van Meijeren op kunnen sluiten. Trap er niet in! Enniewee, zin om te vrijen met behulp van een antiek darm-condoom ter waarde van 600 euro nu.

DÜSSELDORF (ANP) - Parfumerie- en cosmeticawinkelketen Douglas is somberder over de resultaten dit jaar. Door onzekerheid over de economische gevolgen van oorlogen kijken consumenten kritischer naar de prijs. Daardoor stelt het bedrijf onder andere zijn verwachtingen over de winstgevendheid en omzet naar beneden bij.

"Door de aanhoudende geopolitieke en macro-economische onzekerheid blijven veel klanten prijsbewust en stellen ze hun aankopen vaak uit in afwachting van aanbiedingen", zegt Sander van der Laan, de Nederlandse topman van de van oorsprong Duitse keten.

Volgens Van der Laan presteren de onlineverkoopkanalen van Douglas beter dan de stenen winkels. Het bedrijf herschikt zijn investeringen en richt zich op verdere digitalisering en "concurrerende prijzen".

Douglas probeert ook een onderscheidender aanbod aan parfums en make-upproducten te ontwikkelen. Zo hoopt het bedrijf te scoren met lanceringen van merken in samenwerking met bekende modellen en actrices.

BRUSSEL (ANP) - Oekraïne gaat met de Duitse wapenindustrie werken aan verdedigingsmiddelen tegen de snelste Russische raketten. De twee landen hebben daarover een overeenkomst getekend, zegt president Volodymyr Zelensky. Voor komende winter moeten er al resultaten worden geboekt, aldus Zelensky. Er is haast geboden, want "Russische ballistische raketten blijven een probleem".

"Wij hebben enkele technologieën, Duitsland heeft er enkele", zei Zelensky bij overleg op het NAVO-hoofdkwartier over militaire hulp aan zijn land. De overeenkomst moet "die capaciteiten samenbrengen. Laten we dit zo snel mogelijk doen, voor onze gezamenlijke verdediging". Zelensky nodigt "alle landen uit om bij te dragen aan deze gezamenlijke inspanning".

Alleen de Amerikaanse Patriot-luchtafweerraketten weten tot dusver echt raad met ballistische raketten, maar die zijn schaars. "We moeten een antwoord vinden op dat probleem", zei Zelensky.

Het Oekraïense Fire Point zegt al aan een alternatief voor de Patriot te werken.

Wandelend langs de oever hadden mijn vrouw en ik al enkele keren een knus eendengezin in het water waargenomen.