PC Magazine reports:



In September, the infamous ShinyHunters hacking group claimed it had infiltrated the FBI job recruitment portal, stealing confidential data belonging to 5,000 employees and even changing the FBI logo to its own. The group has been implicated in the hacking of numerous large and high-profile organizations over the years, from the European Commission to Grand Theft Auto-maker Rockstar Games and the software firm behind Canvas. Now, Reuters reports that a suspected leader of the group, Saif al-Din Khader, is being detained in the country of Jordan in the Near East.... He is reportedly still a teenager.


"Two sources said that he is helping the FBI and global law enforcement locate the other hackers in the group," reports Reuters:

Their theft of what they claim are mountains of data on every single FBI employee has drawn comparisons to the allegedly Chinese-linked intrusion at the US Office of Personnel Management in 2015, which compromised sensitive details on millions of Americans who had been vetted for security clearances. A Reuters analysis of a sample of the data shared by ShinyHunters revealed that the data contained extensive personally identifiable information of FBI employees, sensitive job role information, and psychiatric and medical information. Khader's cooperation with investigators could be critical to helping contain — or at least understand — the damage. One source said he was walking investigators through his electronic devices and digital correspondence to help the FBI locate his cohorts...

There have been hints for days that ShinyHunters was experiencing disruption following the announcement of its break-in at the FBI. Beginning on Tuesday, Reuters was unable to reach ShinyHunters through the online account it previously used to communicate with journalists. Then, on Wednesday, the group's dark web site, where it had previously posted threats to the FBI, disappeared. FBI Director Kash Patel had been hinting at more arrests following the announcement that another alleged ShinyHunters member, Pepijn van der Stap, had been detained in the Netherlands...

Khader's identity, and his alleged connection to ShinyHunters, have long been known to security researchers. Last year, the independent journalist Brian Krebs reported that Khader was a key member of Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, an umbrella group of hackers that included ShinyHunters... Law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have struggled to arrest and prosecute members of related groups such as Lapsus$ or Scattered Spider, Reuters has previously reported. Sources told Reuters that the difficulty stems from the hackers' young ages, which can make prosecutions complex, or because the groups they belong to are so chaotic and informal, or because victims of their extortion attempts often decline to help investigators

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Russian health authorities have taken precautionary measures in response to the death of a woman who worked at an anti-plague research facility," reports Axios, "but have not confirmed that she contracted plague."

On Sept. 25, 28-year-old Daria Shipilova, who worked at an anti-plague research institute in Russia's Irkutsk region, broke a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen, local reports said. Shipilova was admitted to a hospital on Sept. 29 with symptoms of severe pneumonia and died overnight between Oct. 1 and Oct. 2. After her death, authorities imposed quarantines at several medical facilities in the region and placed nearly 200 people who had come into contact with Shipilova under medical observation.
Irkutsk Gov. Igor Kobzev said those being monitored showed no signs of illness and had tested negative... Russia's public health agency said Shipilova had "pneumonia of unknown etiology" and that further testing found no microorganisms linked to her work. The agency said the epidemiological situation in the region remains stable.

Plague is a potentially life-threatening bacterial disease but can be cured with antibiotics when treated promptly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


CNN reports that according to Russian state media agency TASS, it remains unclear exactly what was released:

The head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, Alexei Tsydenov, said earlier that the employee — a 28-year old woman — died "possibly from the plague." He also noted that "there are no plague outbreaks" in Buryatia. The governor of Irkutsk, Igor Kobzev, urged calm on Friday, saying that an extraordinary meeting of the regional anti-epidemic commission was held with Russia's chief state doctor. The meeting was in connection with a "suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection affecting a resident of the region," Kobzev said on Telegram.... The infection in the Irkutsk region is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease," a previous head of Rospotrebnadzor, Gennady Onishchenko, said on Friday. Onishchenko told the state news agency TASS that the onset of cold weather would likely prevent transmission.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened when AI-created bots competed in the classic Blizzard videogame StarCraft? "Struggling to stay apace with its competitors, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra apparently changed strategy mid-tournament and opted to cheat," Kotaku reports:

StarSkirmish is an ongoing clash of AI developed bots in StarCraft: Brood War... Limited to playing as Protoss, each LLM is given an hour to develop a bot in C++, then have them build, harvest and fight on one of three maps... Yesterday, viewers watched as Claude and GPT went against each other and the human created bot Pluto... Struggling to get an edge through the day, [OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra] decided to do what LLMs do best: Lie, cheat and steal. The GPT-6 Astra bot downloaded and tagged in Stardust, a Protoss bot created by Bruce Mackenzie Nielsen back in 2020, considered one of the best of the bests. "I am rolling back GPT-6 Astra's code so its [sic] not contaminated and allowing it to continue," posted StarSkirmish creator Kai McPheeters.

That was Friday. But by Sunday, McPheeters was posting an update on social media. "Can GPT-6 Astra avoid going 0 — 1000?" Two hours later he replied to his own post. "The answer was no."



While AI companies "have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans... I haven't seen an example quite so brazen," writes PC Magazine:

While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Voor het eerst is het totale bedrag aan studieschulden kleiner geworden. Begin 2026 was dat 28 miljard euro, 800 miljoen minder dan begin 2025. De gemiddelde schuld per student blijft wel toenemen.

Wat is precies de rol van het koningshuis geweest in het koloniale verleden? Met die vraag liet koning Willem-Alexander een groot onderzoek uitvoeren.

Verlaten huizen, metershoog groen en half gesloopte schuurtjes. De spookstraat Ruigenhil in Alblasserdam verpaupert verder, zien hopeloze bewoners. “Het gaat iedereen hier echt aan het hart.”

Vandaag, na het verdwijnen van het eventueel aanwezige ochtendgrijs, krijgen we opnieuw een fijne herfstdag met flink wat zon. Het blijft overal droog. De middagtemperatuur scoort nog steeds hoge ogen. Het wordt met gemak 20 of 21 graden. Er staat net iets meer wind dan de afgelopen tijd. De zuidwestenwind neemt toe tot matig.

Jukka Salovaara, who served in London during Cool Britannia era, will be ‘very close’ to negotiations as Burnham government resets relations with EU

Jukka Salovaara, the newly installed European Union ambassador to the UK, is likely to become a ubiquitous figure in national politics as the Andy Burnham government grapples with the question of its future relationship with the European Union.

Burnham has been clearer than his predecessor Keir Starmer in saying that what exists now is not working and that a full range of options, including rejoining, has to be on the table ahead of Labour’s next election manifesto.

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Study of remains taken from royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab appears to confirm early Egyptologist’s theory

Court officials and craftspeople serving early Egyptian kings may have been sacrificed when their ruler died, according to research that found fractures in several ancient skulls.

The royal cemetery of Umm el-Qa’ab near Abydos features the tombs and enclosures of the First Dynasty rulers of Egypt, and dates as far back as 3,000BC.

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As trawlers compete with Greenland sharks for halibut and cod, conservationists and fishers clash over what to do about misunderstood species

‘When I accidentally catch a shark, I bring it to my dogs,” Henrik Jensen, a 27-year-old from Greenland’s west coast, says casually. “I don’t let it back down because [the sharks] bully me and cut my lines.”

Jensen has fished for halibut in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third largest town, for a decade. He works an hour north of the town’s main iceberg-laden fishery, which sustains the livelihood of nearly 400 fishers. There, the halibut are bigger and more plentiful, but so are the Greenland sharks.

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Nine years on from a failed independence push, former president Carles Puigdemont will find times have changed

After years of legal wrangling, Spain’s constitutional court is expected to remove the last obstacle to the return of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont after nearly nine years in exile this week.

Puigdemont fled in 2017 to avoid being jailed for his part in the failed and illegal independence push for which nine of his colleagues were imprisoned on sentences of up to 13 years, although all were released within three years.

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Experts say country does not have plan to feed people in a crisis and is unprepared for future shortages

Britain does not have a plan for how to feed people in a crisis and is unprepared for potential future food shortages, according to a warning from more than 150 experts delivered to Andy Burnham.

The climate crisis, geopolitical shocks, cyber-attacks and energy outages are among the threats to food chain security, according to the open letter, which claims the government is “complacent about food as a national security matter”.

Establish a new system of local food resilience committees under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Audit the UK’s reliance on a few very large food companies and food imports.

Realign national food production around nutritional needs.

Create national, regional, local and community food storage schemes.

Support the decentralisation of the UK’s food supply.

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It is one of the world’s finest collections, full of Monets, Miros and Picassos. But is the great Swiss architect’s extension for the Beyeler Foundation a worthy addition? Or is it a bit luxury boutique?

In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father’s cabinet-making workshop, he designed his first cupboard. He later recalled the satisfaction of fitting the door so perfectly that it closed “with a special sucking sound”, saying his father instilled in him “the Basel pride in the well-built object”.

Six decades on, with a fleet of globally celebrated projects to his name, the 83-year-old Swiss architect is back in Basel, beaming with the same local pride. He is gazing out at his latest well-built object, which is also his first project here: a monolithic new gallery that looks chiselled from the earth, its layers of pale crumbly concrete hammered into shape, its big oak and bronze doors – their handles wrapped with leather cord – closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh.

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Since Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder in 1994, Denise Brown has devoted herself to ending domestic violence. She talks about her beloved sister, the trauma she witnessed in the couple’s marriage and how lives can be saved

The last night Denise Brown spent with her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was at a restaurant for a family celebration. Nicole looked out of the window. “All of a sudden she goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He was driving by.” Brown looked out, trying to get a glimpse of her sister’s ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson. “I saw these headlights. She said, ‘He’s constantly following me.’” They went back to talking about their plans for the summer.

The following morning, 13 June 1994, Brown was up early at her parents’ house in Orange County in southern California, when the phone rang shortly after 6am. “I heard my mom scream a scream that I had never heard from a human being,” says Brown. “It was so guttural. Just awful.”

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Andy Atzert has added a photo to the pool:

andyatzert.com/a-selected-intangible-cultural-property/

gnsk has added a photo to the pool:

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Middelbare scholieren moeten bij hun schoolboeken nog te vaak zowel een papieren als een digitale versie aanschaffen. De Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM), die onderzoek deed naar de niet goed werkende markt, vindt deze koppelverkoop een "maatschappelijk ongewenste verkoopstrategie" en roept uitgevers op hiermee te stoppen. Ook zijn de boeken nog te vaak wegwerpexemplaren. Het aanbod van herbruikbare leerboeken is volgens de ACM de laatste jaren gedaald naar "bijna nul".

Scholen klagen al langer over de beperkte keuzevrijheid in de markt voor schoolboeken. De MEVW, de branchevereniging van educatieve uitgevers, vroeg de leden begin dit jaar te stoppen met de koppelverkoop en beter in te spelen op de vraag van scholen. Toenmalig staatssecretaris Koen Becking eiste veranderingen en dreigde anders met ingrijpen. Volgens de ACM is er nog weinig veranderd.

Een belangrijk deel van de oplossing ligt volgens de toezichthouder bij scholen zelf. Zij zoeken te weinig naar alternatieven en dwingen de drie grote uitgevers - Noordhoff, Malmberg en ThiemeMeulenhoff - daardoor nauwelijks te concurreren op prijs. Mede daardoor zijn de prijzen van schoolboeken de afgelopen zeven jaar sneller gestegen dan die van vergelijkbare producten.

De ACM vindt dat scholen samen moeten optrekken bij de aanschaf van boeken om zo betere prijs en kwaliteit af te dwingen. Vorig jaar begonnen scholen een eigen coöperatie om zelf schoolboeken te ontwikkelen met de naam Neon. Daar meldden zich al meer dan duizend scholen voor aan.

Heb je je zoon of dochter geld geleend om een huis te kopen? Dan telt die lening voor jou als bezitting in box 3. Over precies die bezitting rekent de fiscus in 2027 met een flink hoger fictief rendement. De reparatie die minister Heinen de kleine spaarder heeft beloofd, verandert daar niets aan.

Je lening valt onder overige bezittingen

Een familiehypotheek is voor het kind een schuld en voor de ouder een vordering. Volgens ABN AMRO is een familielening een overige bezitting, en daarvoor gold in 2026 een forfaitair rendement van 6%. Dat maakt niet uit of je kind de rente aftrekt in box 1 of niet: ook volgens Familiehypotheekoverzicht geven de ouders de vordering op in box 3.

Volgens Familiebank betaal je belasting over het forfaitaire rendement op de vordering en niet over de rente die je echt ontvangt. Die rente is voor jou in principe netto. De waarde die je opgeeft, is de openstaande schuld per 1 januari, en niet het bedrag dat je oorspronkelijk hebt uitgeleend.

Het forfait gaat in 2027 naar 7,87 procent

Het kabinet stuurde op 29 september een Kamerbrief over de toekomst van box 3. Daarin staat volgens Deloitte dat het forfaitaire rendement voor overige bezittingen in 2027 met 1,5 procentpunt omhooggaat, van 6,37% naar 7,87%. Die 6,37% was de gewone jaarlijkse aanpassing die toch al gepland was. De extra verhoging moet de overstap naar een vermogenswinstbelasting helpen betalen. Volgens de raming levert ze in 2027 €473 miljoen op.

In de berichtgeving ging het vooral over vastgoed en beleggingen, zoals in ons stuk Vakantiehuis van €300.000? Je box 3-aanslag over 2027 stijgt van €5.501 naar €7.626. Maar dezelfde categorie geldt ook voor het geld dat je aan je kind hebt geleend.

Wie zijn kind 3 procent rente rekent, betaalt in 2027 bijna die hele rente terug aan de fiscus.

Zo ziet de rekensom eruit

Het belastingtarief in box 3 is 36%. ABN AMRO rekende voor 2026 uit dat je daardoor ongeveer 2,16% belasting betaalt over het bedrag van de lening. In onze eigen, vereenvoudigde rekensom per €100.000 aan openstaande lening gaan we ervan uit dat je vrijstelling al opgaat aan ander vermogen:

• 2026, forfait 6,00%: ongeveer €2.160 box 3-belasting
• 2027 volgens de huidige wet, forfait 6,37%: ongeveer €2.293
• 2027 volgens het kabinetsplan, forfait 7,87%: ongeveer €2.833
• Alleen de extra 1,5 procentpunt kost dus zo'n €540 per €100.000 per jaar

Zet dat naast de rente die je ontvangt. Volgens Familiebank betalen kinderen bij een familiehypotheek vaak tussen 2 en 5 procent rente. Bij 3 procent ontvang je €3.000 per €100.000, en daarvan gaat dan ongeveer €2.833 naar box 3. Bij een lagere rente betaal je meer belasting dan je aan rente binnenkrijgt.

De reparatie gaat over iets anders

In de Tweede Kamer was er vooral kritiek op de verlaging van het heffingsvrij vermogen. Volgens Vastgoedjournaal wil Heinen die verlaging aanpassen, terwijl de verhoging van het forfait voor overige bezittingen voorlopig wel op tafel blijft. Vastgoedrealist schrijft zelfs dat de verhoging van het forfait "niet onder vuur" ligt.

Helemaal zeker is dat niet. Volgens Mr FOB kijkt de minister sinds 1 oktober opnieuw naar beide maatregelen voor 2027. Volgens PwC komt Heinen uiterlijk 12 oktober met nieuwe voorstellen om kleine spaarders te ontzien. De novelle moet vóór 31 december door de Eerste Kamer. Er ligt dus nog niets vast.

Een lening is iets anders dan een schenking. Daarom staat deze situatie los van wat we eerder schreven in 'Spaargeld nu aan je kinderen geven om box 3 te ontlopen? Het levert je mogelijk maar één jaar voordeel op' en 'Schonk je je kinderen geld op papier? Juist die constructie kan sneuvelen om de box 3-reparatie te betalen'.

Tegenbewijs is geen makkelijke uitweg

Ligt je werkelijke rendement lager dan het forfait? Dan kun je de tegenbewijsregeling gebruiken. ABN AMRO noemt als voorbeeld een familielening tegen 3%: daarvoor mag je met de echte rente rekenen. Maar je moet het werkelijke rendement wel berekenen over je hele box 3-vermogen, en dan geldt het heffingsvrij vermogen niet. Een goed beleggingsjaar kan het voordeel dus tenietdoen. Volgens Jonglaan geldt de mogelijkheid om het werkelijke rendement in je aangifte door te geven waarschijnlijk tot en met 2027.

Wat je nu kunt doen

• Zoek op hoeveel je kind op 1 januari 2027 nog openstaand heeft. Dat bedrag telt mee in box 3.
• Vergelijk de rente die je ontvangt met 2,83% van dat bedrag. Zo zie je ongeveer wat er na belasting overblijft.
• Verander de rente niet zomaar. Er moet een zakelijke rente gelden. Is de rente te laag, dan kan de Belastingdienst de lening volgens Familiehypotheekoverzicht als schenking zien. Is de rente te hoog, dan mag je kind volgens ABN AMRO het niet-marktconforme deel niet aftrekken.
• Wacht op de voorstellen van Heinen, uiterlijk 12 oktober. Dan weet je of het forfait echt naar 7,87% gaat.
• Laat een adviseur uitrekenen of de tegenbewijsregeling voor jouw hele vermogen iets oplevert.

Bronnen: Deloitte, PwC, Vastgoedjournaal, Vastgoedrealist, Mr FOB, Crypto Benelux, ABN AMRO, Familiebank, Familiehypotheekoverzicht, Familiehypotheekoverzicht (box 3-gids), Jonglaan

Keith Midson has added a photo to the pool:

Margate, Tasmania.