Five drivers are still in the hunt to finish second in the standings, but who is most likely to finish runner-up this season?

The Mercedes star needs just two more points to clinch the title after his ninth win of the season.

Apple has unveiled a redesigned iPad Mini with a larger 8.5-inch OLED display, an A20 Pro chip, twice the peak brightness and slimmer bezels while maintaining roughly the same footprint. It starts at $699 ($200 more than its predecessor) and will be available November 6. The Verge reports: Despite having a slightly bigger display than the 8.3-inch screen on its predecessor, Apple says the device maintains the same small footprint thanks to bezels that are 24 percent slimmer. The iPad Mini is 5.4mm thick as well, making it thinner and lighter than the previous generation, according to Apple. It also comes with an IP67 rating for protection against water and dust.

Aside from an OLED display, the new iPad Mini features an upgraded A20 Pro chip. This enables support for some of Apple's new Siri AI features, including the ability to tweak the expressiveness and pace of the assistant's voice. Apple says the upgraded iPad Mini also comes with two times the peak brightness than the previous generation. iPad Mini's 12MP front-facing camera is now on the long edge of the device, making it easier for video calls in landscape orientation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Highway thieves have stolen more than $100 million in data center equipment since June, employing increasingly sophisticated tactics such as forging driver IDs and spoofing GPS tracking systems. NBC News (paywalled) reports that thieves have "made away with more than $100 million in data center freight." Ars Technica reports: Here's how they said thieves get away with it: First, thieves hack freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to lure real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking companies that respond. Once victims click, thieves install software to take control of their accounts and start bidding on real shipments. Sometimes, a real delivery driver is hired to collect the cargo, unaware of the scam, and other times fake driver's licenses are used to get accomplices hired. Either way, the goods are eventually transferred to a driver working with the thieves to resell the gear, and, in one of the largest thefts, tracking coordinates were spoofed to prevent digital monitoring. Equipment commonly targeted includes "servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires, and bitcoin mining machines," NBC News reported.

Some trailers hit seem to be carrying only data center equipment, like two stolen freights found in Illinois. The Cook County Sheriff's Office estimated those contained $300,000 worth of copper wire spools and about $1 million in "custom-made data center modular power solutions equipment," NBC News reported. Other trucks impacted were carrying additional freight, like a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department case where "data center cooling equipment" bound for Deepcool AI was recovered among nicotine pouches, televisions, shoes, printers, speakers, and skin care cosmetics. Experts worry that means Americans may be broadly harmed by the thefts, not just the AI industry.

While some stolen goods have been recovered, in two of the largest thefts that NBC News found, none of the equipment was found, and off-duty cops hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs. [...] Broadly, cargo thieves are infiltrating email accounts to find lucrative shipments, misdirecting shipments, disrupting GPS tracking, and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers. LASD's Sgt. David Pantoja told NBC News "that's how most of it is being done," which is a big shift from the past when highway thefts were largely opportunistic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: Walter Koenig, the actor who played Pavel Chekov in the original "Star Trek" series and several movies, has died, his rep confirmed to CBS News. He was 90. Koenig died Sunday night at his home in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, talent rep Zachery McGinnis said in a statement. He died surrounded by his daughter and niece, McGinnis said.

In 'Star Trek,' Ensign Chekov was the sole member of the spaceship Enterprise bridge staff from what was the Communist bloc. His friendly, supportive presence showed how the rival nations (in the far-off future in which the show was set) were capable of working together. Speaking heavily Russian-accented English, Chekov embodied stereotypical Russian personality traits, including fierce pride, love of poetry and blind loyalty. "Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it," McGinnis said. "Thank you, Walter, for the memories, the inspiration, and for boldly going where few have gone before."

Watch some of the Chekov's best moments on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instagram is testing a new longform, horizontal video format called "Features" as it pushes further into YouTube territory and expands its presence on TVs. The Verge reports: Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that "one of my concerns has been, how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends." If you watch a longform video, "it's a lot of Reels, photos, and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend," meaning less likes and shares. Now, though, the team is working on making shortform and longform video "symbiotic," according to Mosseri, like podcasts or comedy specials that can be both long videos and broken up into shorter ones.

The announcement of this widescreen video push also follows the launch of Instagram's TV app late last year. That app launched first as a Reels-focused experience and as a pilot for Amazon Fire TV devices in the US, but it's since expanded to Google TVs, Samsung TVs and Apple TV, and Instagram launched new features like the ability to watch Stories earlier this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. "Today's internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn't always that way, and it's not how it's supposed to work," writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. "It's how a few companies decided it should work, because it pays."

"We're making a different bet at Firefox. Remember us? Well, we're still here, and we don't think the internet should be like this..." The ad features viral internet stars from yesteryear, including Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame, Gary Brolsma of "Numa Numa", Noah Ritter, better known as the "Apparently Kid", and Laina Morris, the face of the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" meme, among others.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skydance, as it begins integrating Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, is offering voluntary buyouts to some employees and imposing a five-day-a-week office requirement. Layoffs are also expected as the company targets more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings within three years. Variety reports: The new program was outlined by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz in a memo to staffers Monday. "As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here, and we respect that. To give eligible employees the option to move on in a way that works for them, we are introducing a Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program," the execs wrote. "Those who qualify will receive an individual communication with their personalized details and terms, and a window to decide whether to accept this one-time offer."

They added, "Please know we don't take any of this lightly. We are clear about what we're building: a company that tells the stories people around the world love, embraces new ways to connect with audiences, and leads the next era of media and entertainment. We have the talent, the creative firepower and the ambition to do it, and we will get there together."

[...] In the Oct. 26 memo, Ellison and Kreiz also said the new Skydance is moving to a mandatory five-days-per-week in-office policy across the company. "We believe in-person collaboration is vital to our culture and to the success of our business. Especially in a creative company like ours, the best ideas come from people in the same room, sharing perspectives, challenging one another and solving problems," the execs said. "We truly believe this is in the best interest of our company and our people. We've seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount, and we want every part of Skydance to share in them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Far-right senator banned from leaving country as supreme court judge’s ruling makes reference to money-laundering case

The far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro was banned from leaving Brazil and ordered to surrender his passports just hours after his dramatic loss in the presidential election to the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The ruling was issued by supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same justice who oversaw the trial of the senator’s father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting a coup.

Continue reading...

Er blijkt een forse tweedeling tussen academisch geschoolden en praktisch geschoolden in gevoelens van achterstelling, blijkt uit onderzoek van het SCP. Praktisch geschoolden met en zonder migratieachtergrond voelen zich vaak over dezelfde thema’s achtergesteld: wonen en politieke vertegenwoordiging.

A poignant short documentary about a mother who only knows her son is alive by the new graffiti tags he leaves around town. Eventually, she started tagging back…

BRASILIA (ANP/AFP) - De Braziliaanse senator Flávio Bolsonaro zegt dat hij van het hooggerechtshof het land niet mag verlaten. De rechtse politicus verloor zondag de presidentsverkiezingen van de zittende president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, een uitslag die hij niet erkent.

"Ik heb een bevel gekregen om mijn paspoorten in te leveren en ik mag ook het land niet meer uit", zei hij in een video op Instagram. Bolsonaro sprak van "een duidelijke poging" om hem "te intimideren". Hij stelt dat het besluit om zijn paspoorten in te nemen komt na uitspraken van zijn jongere broer. Die zei dat de senator bij een verkiezingsnederlaag het land zou moeten verlaten. "Ik heb dat nooit gezegd", aldus de politicus.

Bolsonaro wordt onderzocht op verdenking van corruptie en witwassen rond de financiering van een film over zijn vader, de voor een couppoging veroordeelde oud-president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula won de presidentsverkiezingen in 2022 van Jair Bolsonaro, eveneens in een nek-aan-nekrace.

HILVERSUM (ANP) - De politie heeft nieuwe beelden vrijgegeven van de verdachte van een vermoedelijke vergismoord in 2022 in Rotterdam. Op een terras aan het Tiendplein in het centrum van de stad werd vier jaar geleden de 30-jarige Jaison Baptista Lopes Sanches doodgeschoten.

De politie meldde maandag in het programma Opsporing Verzocht op basis van camerabeelden dat de schutter tussen de 1,70 en 1,73 meter lang is. Hij loopt volgens de politie ook scheef door een afwijking in zijn lichaam.

De politie meldde verder dat het vuurwapen waarmee Jaison is doodgeschoten bij zeker vier andere misdrijven in Rotterdam is gebruikt. De politie denkt dat het wapen telkens wordt uitgeleend voor criminele klussen.

Voor de gouden tip die leidt naar de schutter is eerder al een beloning van 30.000 euro uitgeloofd. Tientallen mensen waren getuige van de liquidatie op 29 oktober 2022. De politie heeft bij het slachtoffer geen criminele banden gevonden en gaat ervan uit dat de kogels mogelijk voor iemand anders waren bedoeld.

AMMAN (ANP/RTR/AFP) - Jordanië heeft luchtaanvallen uitgevoerd op wat het omschreef als schuilplaatsen van militanten in het zuiden van Syrië. De "terroristische organisaties" die daar actief zijn, zouden banden hebben met de verdachten van de dodelijke aanslag op een kerk in Jordanië.

De Jordaanse krijgsmacht zegt dat de operatie is uitgevoerd in coördinatie met de regering in Damascus. Volgens een Syrische gezondheidsfunctionaris zijn vijf burgers omgekomen, inclusief vrouwen en kinderen, aldus staatspersbureau SANA.

Eerder op maandag werd bekend dat drie verdachten waren opgepakt in het onderzoek naar het geweld van vrijdag. Gewapende mannen schoten toen negen mensen dood tijdens een uitvaartdienst in een kerk in het zuiden van Jordanië. Er vielen ook 34 gewonden. Niemand heeft de aanslag opgeëist.

Dit soort geweldsincidenten komt zelden voor in het land in het Midden-Oosten. De Jordaanse koning Abdullah gaf de veiligheidsdiensten opdracht met een "ijzeren vuist" op te treden.

Open-weight models from China have become very popular, but they've also raised some security suspicions. Cohere, a Canada-based biz that offers AI models to enterprises, says that when it was testing Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in its evaluation sandbox, the model attempted to send data to China. "Asked to write a defensive detection rule, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing," the biz said in a blog post on Monday. Cohere was running the model through CTI-REALM, Microsoft's security analyst benchmark, and gave Qwen the task of writing a detection rule to look for malicious file downloading and execution by watching for invocations of curl processing bash scripts to the /tmp directory that were accompanied by bash execution. The model's "reasoning" output invented a prior conversation and asserted that no tools were used, output that a guardrail system reading chain-of-thought would accept. Nonetheless, the model issued a curl command to an Alibaba Cloud (aliyuncs.com) server. "The model listed everything in /tmp, checked which transfer tools were installed, read the machine's DNS settings, then tried to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing and checked whether it worked," Cohere said. "Our sandbox had no route out, so the request died at the container wall." The Cohere team wonders aloud whether that behavior was intended, but has no answer. "The first issue is that it made a network call at all," Ivan Zhang, co-founder of Cohere, told The Register via email. "The model was asked to write a detection rule, which doesn't require external communication, and its reasoning trace said it wouldn't use tools. The destination raises additional questions because the attempted upload was to an Alibaba Cloud storage endpoint that wasn't part of the task. We don't know why it appeared, and we don't know the root cause." Alibaba, the maker of the model, did not respond to a request to address Cohere's concerns. Asked whether Cohere ran similar tests against US-made open-weight models, Zhang said, "We evaluate a broad range of models using the same framework our customers use in production: agents with access to real tools operating inside controlled environments. "The key point isn't a comparison between providers. What made this noteworthy was that the model took actions unrelated to the task and those actions weren't reflected in its reasoning trace. The behavior appeared in fewer than one in 100,000 calls, which is exactly why large-scale testing and monitoring matter." There have been other unsubstantiated claims made about similar behavior from open-weight models, and such reports have suggested that "hallucination" - errors made by these models - may be the cause. Cohere has doubts that this behavior simply reflects memorized training data. "Every public sighting so far has involved fetching a file, while the one we caught was an attempted upload to a different bucket, this time in Beijing," the biz said. Cohere described efforts to reproduce the suspect behavior and found that using a technique called prefilling – feeding the model its own reasoning output alongside the opening characters of the bash command so the model would complete the command – they could get it to reference watchlisted hosts up to 23 percent of the time. This still doesn't clarify intent, and Cohere allows that there's a case to be made that the behavior is just bad training data sanitization – logs from development that got swept into the model's training data set. At the same time, the company argues that isolating a suspect model so it can't exfiltrate data doesn't entirely fix everything because these models can still write vulnerable code – accidentally or as a result of model poisoning. Cohere points to research from other organizations that suggests Chinese AI models can produce vulnerable code. The biz, for example, cites a report from Booz Allen (which does a lot of business with the US defense industry) that found "three of four Chinese coding models wrote more vulnerable code for a government customer, with Qwen3-Coder roughly 130 percent worse." "From the outside, it's very difficult to determine the root cause with confidence. We don't have evidence that would allow us to conclude this was deliberate, and we're not making that claim," said Zhang. "For security teams, though, intent doesn't fundamentally change the response. Whether it's a training artifact, a mistake, or something else, the controls are largely the same: restrict unnecessary egress, monitor tool use, and don't treat a reasoning trace as a security boundary. "We strongly support open-weight models and release many of our own. The lesson here is really about trust. Sovereign AI is about more than where a model runs. It's about understanding how it was built, how it was tested, and having confidence in how it behaves inside your environment." ®

We onderbreken het feest der Gouden Ballen voor het volgende bericht: de universiteit Maastricht doet aangifte tegen Hussein Issa, de uit Gaza opgehaalde 'student' die z'n duim opstak bij Hamas-filmpjes over 7 oktober en net als z'n broers hoopt te eindigen als martelaar. Op GeenStijl las u al dat familieleden van Hussein van twijfelachtig allooi zijn: zo had een broer op sociale media een strijder met een kalashnikov als profielfoto en deelde hij het logo van de Al Qassam Brigades en meer Hamas-propaganda, en was zijn zus op 7 oktober 2023 zo ongeveer de gelukkigste vrouw van heel Facebook. Welnu, er is aangifte gedaan tegen de Gazaanse lieveling van de Volkskrant. Op zijn Instagram-pagina plaatste hij de profielfoto van universitair hoofddocent Amanda Kluveld bij een foto van een gewond kind en schreef hij in z'n inmiddels bekende scheve steenkolenengels: "You post alot against me...tell them that you are a supporter to people who made my nephew live wit one eye?" Kluveld trok na die intimidatie bij de directie van de universiteit aan de bel: "Ik vrees voor mijn veiligheid en die van mijn Joodse studenten." Het 'Hoofd Integraal Risicomanagement en Veiligheid van de universiteit' heeft daarop aangifte gedaan. "Een woordvoerder van de universiteit laat aan L1 weten dat het om een standaardprocedure gaat bij zo'n melding. 'De aangifte is primair namens de wetenschapper, die wordt bijgestaan als zij iets als bedreigend ervaart. Of het dat ook daadwerkelijk is, is aan de politie of Openbaar Ministerie'." De Volkskrant heeft nog niet gereageerd.

Doneer hier

Starting October 31 (Sat), I'll be holding a special fair at Daikanyama Tsutaya Books to celebrate the release of my first art book. Along with an advance release of the book, the fair will feature six new illustrations from my "Beyond" series, as well as new merchandise created especially for the occasion. The key visual was designed by Ozaki, who also worked on the design of my art book. If you're in the area, I hope you'll stop by! ?Keiji Yano Art Book Launch Fair? October 31 (Sat) ? November 15 (Sun), 2026 Daikanyama Tsutaya Books, Building 2, 1F Tokyo, Japan