The Associated Press reports:

Italy announced an €805 million ($887 million) fine against Meta on Saturday for using photos and videos from Android users' galleries on Facebook without specific consent or adequate disclosure...
Investigators found that the feature was enabled by default and that Facebook requested gallery access through a single permission covering multiple app functions with different purposes. The authority gave Meta 60 days to disable the feature and seek separate consent for its use.

Italy has about 20 million Android users, notes the BBC, and this fine "is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant."


The charge is related to a feature which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts... According to the Italian regulator, a preceding [authorization] notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery. The regulator said it took into account "the high number of people affected" and the fact it is "still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system". It also cited "Meta's lack of co-operation".

"A Meta spokesperson told the BBC that it planned to appeal..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In three years "Megaspeed International" went from from inactive Chinese gaming subsidiary "to one of Asia's biggest buyers of cutting-edge semiconductors from the US," reports CNN.

"It is incredibly hard to look at this and not see a Chinese state-sponsored network for bypassing US export control networks," trade data investigator William George told CNN.

As Nvidia's Jensen Huang had an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, "Megaspeed quietly instilled billions of dollars of Nvidia chips in data centers across Southeast Asia," CNN writes, noting scrutiny of the company from the Singapore government and US officials "concerned that the company was passing those chips on to unauthorized Chinese buyers..."


In 2022, the US began restricting sales of semiconductors to China, including Nvidia's most advanced. While the controls were meant to curb China's tech industry, they also spawned opportunities for intermediaries willing to help circumvent them. US officials believe Megaspeed may be one of those... [T]rade records show Megaspeed has purchased more than $4 billion in chips and equipment from Nvidia... Based on indictments and investigative reports, research institute Epoch AI estimates that anywhere between 290,000 to 1.6 million advanced US semiconductors were sent to China in violation of export controls last year...

Singapore also initiated investigations into Megaspeed and its controllers, including Alice Huang, for potential false declarations relating to the company's server purchases and their final destinations. In a statement, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said there was insufficient evidence that Huang had committed any related offenses, but she had been barred from re-entering the country after providing inaccurate information "to downplay her role" at Megaspeed. The other investigations are ongoing.

The exact scale of Chinese chip smuggling is impossible to quantify. However, its existence has become something of an open secret in the industry, as well as an indication that US efforts to keep adversaries from securing high-stakes technology still have fundamental flaws. A May report from the short seller Culper Research claimed that despite tightening trade restrictions, Chinese end-users still account for about 20% of Nvidia chip sales via illegal diversion and intermediaries in Southeast Asia.

CNN reminds readers that Jensen Huang accompanied US President Trump to events with Chinese leader Xi Jinping twice this year, and also lobbied for the US to relax controls on Chinese chip imports. "The US government ultimately approved several buyers for less-advanced Nvidia chips, known as H200, while collecting a quarter of the revenue."
"However, blacklisted companies have continued to obtain sensitive semiconductors as well," they add. And the Taiwanese government is even seeking to criminalize unauthorized exports of advanced AI chips to China, "as prosecutors there charged nine people in a scheme to sneak Nvidia chips into China through Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business computing turns 75 this month, and Cambridge's Centre for Computing History is throwing a party for LEO, the machine that helped start it all. The LEO@75 event takes place on Saturday, November 28, from 10am to 5pm, with film screenings, historical displays, and hands-on activities for children. The Register has written about the Centre for Computing History a few times. It's an interactive computer museum just off Coldhams Lane in Cambridge, and back in 2018 it won National Lottery funding to help it "preserve, archive and digitise a range of LEO Computers artefacts, documents and personal memories." Admission supports the museum charity, with student and concession tickets at £10 and family tickets starting at £15. As well as stuff for the grown-ups, including a film screening, it will include events for smaller children (5-7) and a Python coding event for older (12-16) kids. Regular readers might recall our story about the Lyons Electronic Office back in 2021, celebrating its 70th anniversary. The Reg also published an obituary for Mary Coombs, the first female commercial programmer the following year. Coombs started programming LEO in 1952. Both stories offer more on the machine and the people behind it. LEO was an early computer, but from three-quarters of a century away, it's easy to miss just how early. Its design was based on Cambridge University's EDSAC, developed by a team led by the late, great Sir Maurice Wilkes. The Reg mentioned EDSAC in our obituary for Wilkes, and went into more detail for his centenary in 2013. It also crops up in our Geek's Guide to Cambridge. The design of EDSAC was directly inspired by John von Neumann's famous, and incomplete, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" – which The Reg talked about in 2011. The draft report was circulated in 1945, based on the proposal for EDVAC, four years before the hardware was delivered. That was also the year John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert completed its predecessor, ENIAC. In its original form, ENIAC was programmed by setting switches and reconnecting cables; EDVAC, by contrast, was designed to store its instructions in memory. The report set out what's now called the "von Neumann architecture." Wilkes and Douglas Hartree drew on those ideas in developing EDSAC, LEO's immediate forerunner and one of the world's earliest practical stored-program computers. The first working electronic stored-program machine was the Manchester "Baby," the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, which ran its first program in 1948. EDSAC ran its first program in May 1949 – a few months before the delivery of BINAC, Eckert and Mauchly's first stored-program machine. LEO ran its first commercial application in 1951. That was also the year the US Census Bureau took delivery of Eckert and Mauchly's UNIVAC I. ®

mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Investigating Donald Trump's Financial Scandals (Coffeezilla, YouTube, 51m)

PARIJS (ANP) - Frankrijk verbiedt per direct tot eind november de verkoop en het gebruik van meerdere soorten (zwaar) vuurwerk in het land, specifiek vuurwerkmortieren. Dat schrijven Franse media als Le Parisien na verschijning van de maatregel in de staatscourant. Bij de vele demonstraties die recentelijk werden gehouden in het land werd vaak vuurwerk gegooid, onder meer naar ordediensten. De maatregel geldt tot in ieder geval 27 november. Een uitzondering geldt voor wie het vuurwerk professioneel gebruikt.

Vuurwerkmortieren "worden niet langer gebruikt om te vieren, ze worden gebruikt om schade mee te berokkenen", citeert Le Parisien de Franse overheid. "Het recht op demonstratie blijft gegarandeerd, maar het recht om anderen zeer te doen bestaat niet." De mortieren werden onder meer bij de aanhoudende onderwijsprotesten gegooid, soms op hoofdhoogte en gericht tegen onderwijspersoneel, gendarmes en scholieren zelf.

Bij de recente protesten in Frankrijk werden al duizenden mensen opgepakt, van wie sommigen voor ernstige delicten. In meerdere steden werd geplunderd, brand gesticht en gevochten met ordediensten. Onder meer het stadhuis van Limoges ging grotendeels in vlammen op, evenals een toerismekantoor in Lyon. Naast de bestaande onvrede over de staat van het onderwijs en boosheid tegen de regering, is er ook veel discussie in Frankrijk over het geweld dat ordediensten gebruiken om de protesten in te dammen.

Zo liepen verschillende scholieren ernstige verwondingen op door politiegranaten. De Franse ordediensten gebruiken naast traangasgranaten ook projectielen die exploderen of zaken als rubberen balletjes bevatten. Het gebruik daarvan is zeer omstreden. Zo verloor een scholier een hand, en ook iemand een oog. Ook in het verleden leidde het gebruik van vergelijkbare munitie tot ophef, zoals tijdens de gelehesjesprotesten enkele jaren terug.

Veronica Williams PHOTOGRAPHER has added a photo to the pool:

© Veronica Williams PHOTOGRAPHER

The former England centre-back answers your questions on Diego Maradona, Bobby Robson and on staying in strange places

“Have you made up all these on your own?” asks Terry Butcher, sitting in a London office in the week he is presented with his England legacy cap. It turns out dozens of Guardian readers want to pick the brains of a much-loved centre-back who was feted en route to a World Cup semi-final and tormented four years previously by the mercurial genius of Diego Maradona.

Did Maradona ever admit to the “Hand of God”? Butcher found himself in the post-match doping-control room alongside his nemesis at the Azteca in 1986. “I tapped my head, then my hand, and then he tapped his head,” Butcher says. “He didn’t admit to it because, if he had, I’d have been right across that room.”

Continue reading...

Winning his first two grand slams and leading the rankings should be cause for celebration, but the German benefited from a vacuum at the top

Alexander Zverev had plenty of thoughts in the miserable aftermath of his loss at the Paris Masters last week, a 7-6 (5), 6-2 second-round defeat by Lorenzo Musetti marking him as the first ATP No 1 to lose his first match as the top-ranked player in straight sets.

Rather than feeling any pressure surrounding his new status in the buildup to the final Masters 1000 tournament of the year, Zverev had simply been annoyed. “Achieving the world No 1 status is something every player dreams of, but I feel like I’m the only world No 1 in tennis history that has to explain why it’s OK for me to be world No 1. Which I find quite difficult, because I think I deserve to be where I am, even though I lost today.”

Continue reading...

Scientists succeed in breeding wild oysters in Dornoch Firth, near Inverness, from where they disappeared more than 100 years ago

The baby oysters, with their rough cream-coloured shells and ragged edges, are about the size of a 50 pence piece. But off the north-east coast of Scotland, they are proof of a breakthrough in marine conservation.

For the first time in the UK, scientists have succeeded in breeding wild oysters at a site where they had been locally extinct for more than a century, in the Dornoch Firth north of Inverness.

Continue reading...

In their book, the historian Nicole Phillip and journalist Laura Trevelyan use connected experiences to show how reparations can work in practice

When the Grenadian historian Nicole Phillip opened an email from the then BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan in 2022, she uncovered a connection that stretched back centuries.

Their ancestors had stood on opposite sides of enslavement in Grenada: Phillip’s among Africans forcibly taken from their homes and enslaved, Trevelyan’s among the British families who profited from a system that inflicted unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity on generations of enslaved Africans.

Continue reading...

In the second in our series, four young Britons reveal how the search has taken a toll on their mental and physical health

• ‘The social contract is broken’: young people on feeling shut out of careers

• Guardian to follow lives of eight young people in their search for jobs

“I had to quit and move back in with my parents because I had developed ME/chronic fatigue syndrome. I am now housebound and cannot look after myself. Although I cannot prove it, I strongly believe that prolonged period of high stress played a big part in the decline of my health.”

Continue reading...

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

In haar boek 'Als het thuis niet veilig is' blikt Marloes Alferink (43) terug op achttien jaar werken in de jeugdzorg. Haar boodschap: minder regels en meer menselijkheid. "Het moet en kan anders", zegt ze.

Goddank zijn we geen El Salvador, een wantstaltige dictatuur! Het is volkomen onduidelijk wat er gisteren uitgespookt is op spookhuis De Zwaluwenberg door Jetten, Dilan, Bart van den Brink, Jan Paternotte, Brekelmans en Bontenbal, maar we laten ons graag gerust stellen: "Het goede nieuws is dat ze aan het eind van de dag een hapje met elkaar hebben gegeten", aldus RTL Nieuws. Heel fijn, en iedereen met gescheiden ouders herbeleeft het uitstel van executie, het onvermijdelijke ongewis dat met elke 'oprechte lach ondanks alles' dichterbij komt.

Gelukkig heeft zich een nieuw moreel richtsnoer aangediend, namelijk 's lands "voorname bestuurders" die bij Nieuwsuur waarschuwen tegen een kabinetsval, en moet je er even overheen kijken dat die voorname bestuurders dan wel Thom de Graaf (D66), Sharon Dijksma (PRO) zijn. "Het is volstrekt onverantwoord als dit kabinet demissionair wordt", zegt Sharon Dijksma, burgemeester van Utrecht en voorzitter van de Vereniging van Nederlandse Gemeenten. "Ook in internationale context." Dat vindt ook D66-prominent Thom de Graaf. "We hebben zo veel behoefte aan stabiliteit." De oud-vicepresident van de Raad van State pleit voor het aanstellen van een procesbegeleider die de boel kan lijmen. Iemand die - anders dan premier Jetten - geen partijpolitieke agenda heeft."

Hoe dan ook, vandaag om 11:00 worden de 'gesprekken' 'hervat', al blijft 0 x 0 natuurlijk 0. En goddank staat de pers er voor het hek om de geblindeerde auto's vast te leggen, anders hadden we echt geen idee wat er speelde!

Social