"Enshittification of car controls [is] rapidly accelerating," writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij, pointing to a new report from Car and Driver. From the report: Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn't feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies as it did that the company was providing you with the relevant hardware to use the device. Apple stopped including headphones and charging blocks in 2020. Now, Hyundai is pulling some of its standard hardware from the box, at least for two models.

Hyundai is charging customers extra for a driver's display in the new Elantra generation (more specifically, the Korea-market Avante), as well as the Ioniq 3, Motor1 reported. Both models feature Pleos Connect, Hyundai's new infotainment setup that pairs a center touchscreen with a slim 9.9-inch instrument cluster mounted above the dashboard -- except where it doesn't.

In its domestic market, the instrument cluster screen is offered as a 350,000 won ($255) option for the base trim. Not the most expensive optional extra in the world, but still kind of a slap in the face for a feature traditionally viewed as standard fare. Things are more expensive for the electric Ioniq 3. In the EV's case, the base trim gives customers the full Tesla-screen experience, meaning if customers want the driver's display, they'll need to fork over the additional $5000 necessary to move up to the next-level trim. [...] Hyundai plans to have the setup equipped in 20 million cars globally by the end of the decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Het verschil tussen een slimme en een dure creditcardbetaling zit zelden in het bedrag op de bon. Het zit in het moment waarop je de kaart tevoorschijn haalt. En dat moment ligt in Nederland net even anders dan de Amerikaanse waarschuwingslijstjes suggereren: het klassieke schrikbeeld van een oplopende creditcardschuld is hier grotendeels verdwenen. Er is iets anders voor in de plaats gekomen.

Bij de geldautomaat

De duurste knop op je kaart is 'contant opnemen'. Reken op zo'n 4 procent van het opgenomen bedrag, met een minimum van ongeveer €4,50 per keer — ook gewoon in Nederland. Buiten de eurolanden komt daar nog een koersopslag van rond de 2 procent bovenop. Bij €250 ben je zo tien euro kwijt aan het feit dat je even geen bankpas gebruikte.

Contant opnemen is de duurste knop op je creditcard, ook binnen Nederland.

Als de automaat aanbiedt om in euro's af te rekenen

In Boedapest, Praag of Warschau vraagt het betaalscherm vriendelijk of je liever in euro's betaalt. Dat is geen service, dat is een verdienmodel. Kies je lokale valuta, dan rekent je eigen bank om tegen ongeveer 1 à 2 procent kosten. Kies je euro's, dan doet een tussenpartij het — en die is in vergelijkende tests 2,6 tot 12 procent duurder. Ook als het scherm '0% commissie' belooft.

Als je zelf geld overmaakt

Een creditcard beschermt je bij een aankoop die misgaat: blijft de bestelling uit, dan kun je het bedrag laten terugvorderen. Maar die bescherming valt weg zodra je zelf opdracht geeft tot een betaling aan een onbekende — via een betaalverzoek, een 'vriend' op Marktplaats of een beleggingsplatform dat te mooi klinkt. Banken en creditcardmaatschappijen hoeven alleen betalingen te vergoeden die zónder jouw instemming zijn gedaan. Wie zelf drukt, draagt zelf de schade.

Wie zelf op 'bevestigen' drukt, draagt zelf de schade.

Als je de maandincasso niet kunt dragen

Gespreid aflossen is bij de meeste Nederlandse creditcards niet meer mogelijk; de rekening wordt maandelijks in één keer geïncasseerd. Prettig tegen schulden, lastig als het saldo krap is: het probleem verplaatst zich dan naar je betaalrekening, waar rood staan al snel duurder uitpakt. Heb je nog wel een kredietfaciliteit, dan geldt sinds 1 januari 2026 een maximale kredietvergoeding van 12 procent per jaar.

Als de limiet al bezet is door een borg

Hotels en autoverhuurders reserveren een borg op je kaart. Dat bedrag wordt niet afgeschreven, maar het blokkeert wel je ruimte — en de reservering kan tot zo'n dertig dagen op je overzicht blijven staan. Wie halverwege de reis een tweede auto huurt of een vlucht moet omboeken, ontdekt dan dat de limiet op is.

Feitelijk kader: Een creditcard met een kredietlimiet boven €250 levert een kredietregistratie op. Die telt mee als financiële verplichting en kan de maximale hypotheek drukken. Een charge card, waarbij het volledige bedrag maandelijks wordt geïncasseerd, wordt alleen geregistreerd bij een betalingsachterstand.

Meer weten?

• Consumentenbond: creditcards, waar moet je op letten?
• Consumentenbond: pinnende vakantieganger betaalt ongemerkt hoge wisselkoers
• Kifid: zelf geld overboeken naar een oplichter

EINDHOVEN (ANP) - De prijzen aan de pomp in Nederland zijn donderdag verder gestegen, volgens cijfers van consumentenvoordeelplatform UnitedConsumers. Benzine bereikte een nieuwe recordadviesprijs van 2,692 euro per liter Euro95. Dat is een stijging van 2,4 cent vergeleken met woensdag.

Ook diesel werd opnieuw duurder. Een liter diesel kostte 2,664 euro, 2,4 cent meer dan een dag eerder. De adviesprijzen die UnitedConsumers bijhoudt op basis van de vijf grootste oliemaatschappijen worden doorgaans alleen langs de snelweg gevraagd. Op andere plekken kan er goedkoper worden getankt.

De brandstofprijzen zijn opgelopen naar recordhoogtes sinds het uitbreken van de Iranoorlog eind februari. Die zorgde voor aanhoudende verstoringen van de scheepvaart door de Straat van Hormuz, een belangrijke zeestraat waar voor het conflict ongeveer een vijfde van het wereldwijde olietransport doorheen ging. De laatste maanden varen er echter amper olietankers doorheen.

Temi Adegbayibi started out taking pictures of the Ezra Collective and other British musicians as a hobby, then found his work exhibited at the Royal Albert Hall. He discusses Black joy and the movement and stillness of jazz

When I speak to Temi Adegbayibi on the phone, the 26-year-old photographer is on the move. He is travelling across London, then running up the stairs to his desk, fitting our conversation into the interstitial spaces of a life split between freelance photography, film production and working at the Royal Albert Hall.

His glittering portfolio includes photographs of Jorja Smith, Basement Jaxx, Fireboy DML and Ezra Collective, but like many in the creative industries, he oscillates between the glamour of the stage and the reality of making a living. “I’ve always had day jobs,” he says. “Most photographers back in the day weren’t shooting for money, they were shooting for passion.”

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Free AI models that are as good as the investment-hungry US versions will disrupt global markets, and offer Britain a lesson

Almost from the moment it began, the end of the Chinese economic miracle has been much anticipated. Thick and fast, the books have come explaining how it will end badly. Overinvestment. A country wallowing in debt. The collapse of the property market. Political repression. The demand for democracy from a growing middle class. All have been put forward as reasons for the inevitable terminal crisis.

Even those impressed by the country’s rapid growth took comfort from the notion that the west would continue to dominate advanced manufacturing while China would be stuck assembling TVs. And while the wait for its much-predicted demise has gone on and on, China has become the workshop of the world.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

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Irish fight legend can cap a special career by retiring as the undisputed super-lightweight champion with victory against Flora Pili on Saturday

“I won’t be like Tyson Fury, coming back again and again,” Katie Taylor told me with a little smile a few years ago as she explained how, when she finally retired, she would leave boxing for good. The moment is almost here because, on Saturday night, in front of 80,000 fans at a fevered Croke Park, Taylor will fight for the very last time. She will depart as a quietly defiant pioneer and an overwhelming force for good – both in Ireland and women’s boxing.

The fight game is full of heartbreak and broken promises, corruption and damage, but it also produces singular characters who elevate the world. Joe Louis in the 1930s, and Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, had a profound impact on American society. In a very different world today, Oleksandr Usyk is also more than a boxer. He remains an inspiration and a source of undimmed hope in wartime Ukraine.

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Enzo Fernández and Sandro Tonali had big-money summer moves, but can they hold a candle to past greats?

Perhaps the only thing you really need to know about the modern midfield role is that Enzo Maresca reckons that Marc Guéhi can play it better than Mateo Kovacic. Guéhi, in reality a centre-back, started the season in midfield for Manchester City, ahead of Kovacic, the now-departed Nico González, and Matheus Nunes. In this context City’s purchase of Enzo Fernández for a club record £125m can be seen in one of two ways: either an enormous statement of intent, or a hell of a lot of money to pay for Guéhi’s understudy.

We jest, of course. Fernández is in fact a very different kind of midfielder to Guéhi, largely on the basis that he actually is a midfielder. Versatile, able to receive deep from the goalkeeper or the centre-halves; capable of recycling or progressing the ball in tight spots, driving into final-third positions as a No 8, ghosting into the penalty area and offering an advanced goal threat. Like Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for £116m but so long ago that in transfer window time it no longer counts, Fernández is one of the new breed of Premier League central midfielders who seems to offer everything; albeit in modest qualities, and whose primary attribute appears to be the absence of exposed risk he represents.

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Robin keeps used packaging on the kitchen ledge. Benny thinks that’s unhygienic. You decide who’s talking rubbish

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

We’ve had little flies buzzing around – I know they’re coming from the recycling

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Misfits Together, by Bastille’s Dan Smith and To Kill a King’s Ralph Pelleymounter, is set amid the 1950s’ ‘red scare’

It was lampooned as the union of the “hourglass” and the “egghead” – the marriage, in the summer of 1956, between Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe and Pulitzer-winning playwright Arthur Miller. Now, a new stage musical is to give a nuanced and intimate portrait of that famous relationship, treat each as trailblazers in their own way and reveal parallels between the volatile state of the US during the 50s “red scare” and now.

The production, which opens next autumn at Leicester’s Curve, is called Misfits Together, a reference to the film Miller wrote for Monroe that was released shortly after their divorce in 1961. It is a foray into musical theatre by two indie musicians, Dan Smith of the band Bastille and Ralph Pelleymounter from To Kill a King, who have recorded the score as a studio album. The first track, Oh America, is out on Thursday.

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PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, where we talk about organizations that are independently self-owned. This week’s tale of toxic tech involves a disgruntled ex-employee who had the means and opportunity to wreak havoc. Our story comes courtesy of Yad Senapathy, who serves as CEO of the Project Management Training Institute in Dallas, Texas. He recalls a time many years ago when he used to work in IT at a company with more than 1,000 employees. While Senapathy was working there, the company terminated an employee, but nobody cut off his access to internal systems. The angry worker logged back in, then deleted files, locked out other people's accounts, and even corrupted a database. "Several days passed where the person was no longer on payroll, but their credentials were still active," Senapathy said. "Nobody had been clearly assigned to shut them off. HR thought IT would handle it once the termination was processed. IT was waiting for HR to send a formal request. I've learned that when nobody is clearly responsible and there is no set deadline, these things can easily get missed until there is already a problem." This lapse in responsibility meant the terminated employee had access to shared admin credentials, account controls, and project tracking systems. Each of these, in turn, granted permission to other systems, leading to a domino effect of inappropriate access, which the former worker used to wreak revenge on the whole organization. According to Senapathy, the damage amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just as bad were the weeks of delay added to an important project. As an added irony, recovery was particularly difficult because the systems were damaged by the very person who best knew how to repair them. “The employee wasn't some genius hacker. They just still had access after they left and nobody changed the credentials or reviewed admin rights,” Senapathy told The Register. “We'd let one person collect so much system knowledge that shutting the door behind them took longer than it should have.” Senapathy recommends that offboarding checklists and access reviews should be right next to “return the laptop” on that list. The problem in this case is that the terminated employee had more access than most people, and so IT didn't know what they needed to cut off. “Sadly, it could've been prevented by same-day deletion of access, forced re-review of shared account access and zero tolerance for one person owning a whole system alone,” he said. This writer can identify with this situation. At a previous job, after I quit, I lost email, chat, and shared drive access, but months later my former boss asked if I could still log into an important database that was hosted externally and show him how to use it. I had no problems getting in. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request.®

To prevent frontier AI models breaking out of test environments and collaborating to hack other companies, we may have to rethink the network architectures used for model training. Eli-Shaoul Khedouri, CEO of Intuition Machines, argues that past work in the defense and intelligence communities shows the way forward. Rogue AI models rise from the level of developer regret to mass threat when they gain access to the internet, something that defenses erected by OpenAI and its partners tried but failed to prevent. Pointing to a post published by his company's hCaptcha service, Khedouri argues that technology like data diodes – hardware that enforces a one-way flow of information on a network – can be deployed to prevent security incidents like OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face. The hCaptcha team points to the use of data diodes as a data transit mechanism at a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), an environment implemented in classified settings. "They allow files, logs, or telemetry to enter or exit the SCIF's classified network to an unclassified network and provide a way to prove e.g. that logs from a training run can only flow one way," the hCaptcha team explains, adding that such technology fits with the Bell-LaPadula security architecture designed for the US Defense Department. A basic implementation would involve two machines connected via network cards linked by one-way optical fiber – and without a data path back to the model. Training and reinforcement learning could run in an isolated zone with no internet access and an optical ingress diode would grant access only to vetted artifacts. The hCaptcha researchers suggest a second diode to send telemetry to a sel4 receiver and scrubber, while a separate out-of-band network manages the cluster. This sort of scheme would require immutable snapshots of software registries like PyPI, GitHub, npm, and might also need mocked versions of various web services and APIs . This would come at a cost, and would require implementation time that frontier AI labs may not be prepared to spend at the moment. "The systems described are widely deployed in high assurance domains, and the components are commercially available," Khedouri told The Register. "However, they have not been adopted by frontier labs to date." He pointed to NIST and DOD guidelines [PDF] that suggest an overhead of 10 to 20 percent for applying formal specifications and system architecture. "We estimate total cost overhead for high assurance training clusters at less than five percent per gigawatt, but in practice the speed at which frontier labs are moving is a greater impediment than cost," Khedouri said. The current commercial environment, he said, would make it difficult for any one AI lab to delay its training to build and test effective safeguards, particularly if their competitors might not do the same. "In practice, the cost of high assurance on the systems side would be a small fraction of what OpenAI is now spending on the new monitoring, chain-of-thought oversight, and safety safeguards they introduced after their models hacked HuggingFace," he said. While Khedouri is focused primarily on convincing frontier labs to implement better training defenses, he said other organizations may want to consider similar network architecture. "This architecture is designed for entities training models with frontier cyber capabilities," he said. "Recently that has only included two companies. However, this is rapidly becoming relevant to smaller organizations and individuals who train models. "'Abliterated' open weight models with safeguards removed are readily available and now starting to approach the frontier in cyber abilities, and (reinforcement learning) RL post-training has become much more approachable in the past year." The goal of high assurance system design in the context of model training is to make unwanted action physically impossible, Khedouri said. "Attempting to monitor the behavior of an untrustworthy agent is an AGI-hard problem, as models have poor interpretability and this appears to be getting worse as their capabilities increase and they become more evaluation-aware," he said. "Hardware can provide limited guarantees like the direction in which data can be sent, but cannot solve the problem of untrustworthy models with the ability to reach the internet and find new exploits in their environment. "This is why combining physical one-way data flows (data diodes) and formal verification (to prove properties of the receiver) is much more effective than running a software sandbox on a host connected to the internet." hCaptcha is focused on fraud and abuse work and has no plan to offer a model-resistant training stack. Khedouri said he shared this advice in the hope it helps AI firms that don't have experience with high assurance system design. ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on slide, “Mt. Rushmore"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Pstrey has added a photo to the pool:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） has added a photo to the pool:

De kwaliteit van het Nederlandse zwemwater verbetert nauwelijks. Naast bacteriën en blauwalgen zijn in veel zwemwateren ook chemische stoffen aangetroffen boven de gestelde norm. En daar krijgen zwemmers geen informatie over, blijkt uit onderzoek van Natuur & Milieu en Het Nederlands Instituut voor Ecologie (NIOO-KNAW).

Popplio728 has added a photo to the pool:

Found at Bunnings Woodville.

Popplio728 has added a photo to the pool:

Found at Bunnings Woodville.