Vagabundo 007 has added a photo to the pool:

Testing an AI blurring tool

President has sued the broadcaster for $10bn, claiming a documentary on 2021 Capitol attack led to financial harm

Donald Trump’s legal team is making an 11th-hour attempt to block a court order that would grant the BBC access to the president’s financial records, as part of his multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the British broadcaster.

Trump claims that the BBC’s 2024 documentary on the January 6 attacks have damaged the president’s business interests. In July, a Miami-based judge ruled that the president would have to start handing over detailed financial records to the BBC by 6 August. The records would reveal details into the hundreds of businesses owned by the US president’s family trust.

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• Fifa president sits at match with No 2 Mattias Grafström

• Flying to South America on Thursday to shore up support

Gianni Infantino is continuing to fight for his future after holding crisis talks with senior officials in Rabat on Wednesday.

The under-pressure Fifa president has spent the last week in Morocco after attending Throne Day celebrations to mark the 27th anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s accession, and will fly to Colombia on Thursday to attend the inauguration of the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, in the city of Cali.

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Kansas Democrats nominated State Senator Cindy Holscher for governor after she defeated party-backed rival Ethan Corson. "The race became a test of what sort of candidate Democratic voters prefer in what is expected to be a challenging general election race: a more moderate candidate like Mr. Corson with endorsements from party leaders or an outspoken populist like Ms. Holscher, who spoke out against data centers and the political establishment," reports The New York Times. From the repot: Even in a national political environment that could favor Democrats, Republicans see the Kansas governorship as among their best opportunities for flipping a seat. President Trump carried Kansas by 16 percentage points in 2024, and Republicans hold supermajorities in the State Legislature. Voters in the Republican primary for governor nominated Ty Masterson, the president of the Kansas Senate and the recipient of Mr. Trump's endorsement, according to The A.P.

Ms. Holscher, who is from suburban Kansas City, sought out a lane to Mr. Corson's political left and made inroads with some of the state's progressive voters. She emphasized her role in unwinding former Gov. Sam Brownback's tax policies and called for a moratorium on data centers. She also spoke against a final deal to lure the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line from Missouri. Ms. Holscher presented an implicit critique of Ms. Kelly's stewardship of Kansas, referring to Mr. Corson as part of a political establishment that was too cozy with corporations and out of touch with the party's voters. "I'm the only Democrat in this race to call for a moratorium on data centers because we have to get these guardrails in place," said Holscher in an interview. "We are having our people and our resources exploited."

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AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm's boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. We only have one documented example so far, and that's Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesday blog post, Schmalbach detailed how he found sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages that are served to AI crawlers but not ordinary browsers. Those pages also contained advertising tags from adtech vendor Mobian ahead of extensive FAQs for online-only bank Ally. The FAQs include brand "facts," such as the number of fee-free ATMs associated with the branchless bank, alongside claims that Ally is "the only bank built for life today," putting it in "a category of one." Key “brand fact” statements that make for great regurgitable facts are also included in the AI-only advertisement, as are answers to questions like “is Ally good for everyday banking,” “can you deposit cash at Ally Bank,” and the like. The FAQ is flagged as sponsored content on the markdown page, but it doesn’t change the fact that the entire thing is written like it was designed to be spit back out by a chatbot in response to specific questions. Not all web crawlers are getting these markdown ads either. Per Schmalbach, Google’s standard search indexing bot doesn't see the ads, as it just gets the same HTML that a human gets. “Only the [chatbot] assistant crawlers get the forked version,” he wrote. That means user-agents including ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot receive the sponsored markdown, while Google's standard search crawler gets the same HTML served to ordinary browsers. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, which OpenAI uses for model training and user-initiated retrieval respectively, return HTTP 406 errors in Schmalbach's tests, while OAI-SearchBot receives the markdown version used to support ChatGPT Search. These AI ad-infused markdown versions of stories should be viewable by humans who change the User-Agent header sent as part of HTTP requests, which is how Schmalbach said he spotted them. The Register tested several articles from Time to see for ourselves, and we were able to replicate the results using the crawler simulator provided by search engine optimization firm Encited. When viewed as ClaudeBot, Time’s Best Inventions of 2025 list includes the Ally Bank ad, as do stories about Time’s top content creators of 2026, as does a gallery of photos from a creators' party held in New York recently to honor the list. The markdown ads don’t appear on newsier stories that we checked, suggesting the ads may be part of more evergreen content rather than articles with a shorter shelf life. As Schmalbach points out in his writeup, this could be “the first clear look at what the web starts to become when the main audience is AI models,” which is a threshold we’ve already crossed. Why advertise to humans when you can make AI do it for you? It’s not clear whether Time’s strategy of advertising to AI crawlers has been adopted by other publishers, but it’d be a shock if others weren’t at least considering it. As noted above, AI crawler traffic has already begun to surpass human visits to webpages, making it potentially more lucrative for advertisers to target those crawlers than the humans who made them. With half of the US consumers surveyed saying they use AI to search the web, the potential to reach consumers by influencing AI responses is incredibly powerful, and that is what Time and its advertising partner Mobian appear to be banking on. When we asked the publication to verify Schmalbach’s report and the results we found, they didn’t answer questions, instead pointing us to a story in media and marketing outlet Digiday from last week that verified not only what we saw but our fears about the scheme, too. Per Digiday, Time started converting its web pages to markdown in order to make them more appealing to AI crawlers in June, and a partnership with Mobian was included in that rework. Time COO Mark Howard told Digiday that the publication’s sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have also converted their websites to markdown, as it suggests those brands are thinking about reaching AI bots. It’s a quote from Mobian CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart that makes the objective clear, however: The company's aim is to shape what AI assistants say about the brands paying for the service. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do,” Goodhart told Digiday. “With a human you influence one person.” So far, the pair confirmed to Digiday that Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute were the first brands trying to influence AI search results, matching the ads Schmalbach and The Register found in AI crawler versions of Time's pages. Time and Mobian told Digiday that the partnership marks the first time a publisher has served ads directly targeting AI crawlers, but that “more are already being lined up.” In other words, you soon may not be able to tell which results in an AI powered search are legitimately being surfaced because of being good products, and which are just gaming the system. It’s the early days of the SEO race all over again, only this time fooling the indexers is as easy as handing any old idiot the same pamphlet over and over again until its content becomes truth. ®

WASHINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG/RTR) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump is van plan om een importheffing in te stellen op polysilicium. Dat melden ingewijden aan Bloomberg en Reuters. Polysilicium is een belangrijke grondstof voor zonnepanelen die in zijn zuiverste vorm ook een grondstof is voor de productie van chips.

Bronnen zeggen tegen Bloomberg dat regeringsfunctionarissen de afgelopen dagen hebben gesproken over een tarief op de grondstof van minstens 15 procent.

Trump wil volgens Bloomberg ook minimumprijzen instellen voor geïmporteerd polysilicium. De maatregelen zouden niet alleen gelden voor ruw polysilicium, maar ook voor apparatuur waarin het wordt verwerkt. Met deze maatregelen wil Washington volgens de ingewijden de productie van polysilicium, halfgeleiders en zonnepanelen in de Verenigde Staten stimuleren.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn woensdag gemengd gesloten. Beleggers verwerkten de kwartaalresultaten van onder meer SpaceX en Walt Disney. Daarnaast is hun hoop op een heropening van de Straat van Hormuz toegenomen.

Het Iraanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken meldde woensdag overeenstemming te hebben bereikt met Oman over vaarroutes door de Straat van Hormuz. Er zouden geen andere landen bij betrokken zijn. De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft dinsdag gezegd dat een deal rond de belangrijke zeestraat, met inbegrip van de Amerikanen, ophanden was.

De Dow-Jonesindex sloot 0,5 procent hoger op 54.349,12 punten. De brede S&P 500-index eindigde 0,2 procent lager tot 7723,55 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq zakte 0,8 procent op 26.363,44 punten. Dinsdag waren nog plussen tot 2,6 procent te zien op Wall Street.

SpaceX

SpaceX verloor 13,6 procent. Het ruimtevaart-, AI- en satellietbedrijf van Elon Musk kwam dinsdag na de slotbel op de beurzen in New York voor het eerst als beursgenoteerd bedrijf met cijfers. Daaruit kwam naar voren dat SpaceX de investeringen in vooral AI-infrastructuur in het afgelopen kwartaal flink heeft verhoogd naar meer dan 18 miljard dollar. Beleggers zijn echter bezorgd of SpaceX de enorme AI-investeringen wel kan terugverdienen.

Nvidia kreeg er 3,4 procent bij. Elon Musk heeft gezegd dat SpaceX in de toekomst alleen nog maar processoren van het chipconcern zou gebruiken bij het bouwen van zijn infrastructuur voor kunstmatige intelligentie (AI).

AMD

Chipbedrijf Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) daalde 7 procent na het publiceren van zijn kwartaalcijfers. De omzetverwachting voor het lopende kwartaal was minder sterk dan sommige analisten hadden verwacht.

Walt Disney pluste 3,7 procent. Het entertainmentconcern heeft in het afgelopen kwartaal een hogere omzet en winst geboekt. De pretparken werden door meer gasten bezocht en ook de cruiseschepen van het bedrijf ontvingen meer mensen.

Uber

Booking Holdings, de eigenaar van onder meer Booking.com, steeg 6,6 procent dankzij beter dan verwachte resultaten. E-commercebedrijf Shopify won 17 procent door goed ontvangen cijfers.

Uber zakte 5,3 procent. De taxi- en bezorgdienst kwam met een verwachting voor het aantal boekingen die net aan de verwachtingen van analisten voldeed. Dit versterkte de zorgen bij beleggers over het vermogen van het bedrijf om zich aan te passen in het tijdperk van zelfrijdende taxi's.

ANTIGUA-GUATEMALA (ANP/AFP) - De uitbarsting van de Guatemalteekse vulkaan Volcán de Fuego is volgens deskundigen voorbij. De autoriteiten hadden groot alarm afgekondigd en ongeveer duizend mensen uit dorpen geëvacueerd.

De ruim 3760 meter hoge vulkaan begon maandag met het spuwen van as, rook, gas en vuur. Ook stroomde lava naar beneden.

De uitbarsting, ongeveer 35 kilometer ten westen van de hoofdstad Guatemala, werd dinsdag sterker, maar is woensdag weer tot rust gekomen.

De Volcán de Fuego behoort tot de actiefste vulkanen van de regio. In 2018 was er een hevige uitbarsting. Dorpen werden verwoest en tweehonderd mensen kwamen om. Er zijn meer dan dertig vulkanen in het land, waarvan er vier vrijwel constant actief zijn.

“In this video, I’ll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end, we’ll use all the chocolate you’ll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest chocolate bar.”

Munly & the Lupercalians