"In order to salve the mental health of freshman students, the University of Michigan has implemented a Pass/No Credit system for new students to improve their mental health," writes Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc. "The process, called 'Grade Covering,' is aimed at helping with the mental health crisis that students face by lessening grade pressure." Axios reports: U-M's College of Literature, Science and the Arts plans to replace first-semester letter grades on freshmen's transcripts with pass/no-credit marks, tentatively beginning in fall 2027. Professors would still assign grades, but they wouldn't appear on external transcripts or count toward students' GPAs.

U-M says the idea, known as "grade covering," could help students adjust to college, take academic risks and "embrace the joy of learning." University spokesperson Chris Sebastian tells Axios that LSA faculty, staff and students will continue shaping the pilot, with more details to come this fall. "While I am sure that there is some pressure on freshman students, one of the best ways of dealing with pressure is enduring it and overcoming it, not attempting to shield people from it," comments Ol Olsoc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Overal worden noodmaatregelen genomen tegen de droogte. Er zijn wel plannen voor ‘droogtemanagement’, maar die zijn vaak nog in een experimentele fase. Nederland moet anders leren omgaan met water. „We zien dat de meest extreme scenario’s met betrekking tot klimaatverandering al eerder realiteit zijn.”

Wallage was meer dan tien jaar burgemeester van Groningen. Ook leidde hij eind jaren negentig de Tweede Kamerfractie van de PvdA.

De Freedom of the Press Foundation en nieuwssite The Intercept hebben Donald Trump voor een federale rechter gedaagd.

Met de verrassende aanstelling van Xavi Hernández als bondscoach gaat de KNVB voor aanvallend en creatief voetbal. Voetbal waarmee Xavi als speler tot grote prestaties kwam, maar dat hij als trainer nog weinig heeft laten zien.

Kapotte camera’s, munten, speelgoed – bij Vintage.com krijgen ze elke dag meer dan duizend dozen met ‘oude troep’ binnen. Wat er precies in zit, is elke keer een verrassing. Op bijna alle ingestuurde spullen doet het bedrijf na taxatie een bod, dat klanten in 80 procent van de gevallen accepteren.

The Kremlin has pushed to reduce university enrollment in favor of vocational training to address industrial labor shortages.

“I believe this is payback for my mother’s active civic stance,” Mikhailova’s daughter said in a video.

In een woning in de wijk Crabbehof in Dordrecht is een wietkwekerij ontmanteld. De onderbuurman had al vijf dagen last van lekkages vanuit de bovenliggende woning, waarna de woningbouwvereniging en de politie op onderzoek uitgingen. Zo werd de kwekerij met 456 planten ontdekt.

Ze zitten er ontspannen bij, de gasten van camping De Zonnewende in Ouddorp. Het is tropisch warm, en zee en strand zijn slechts op twee minuten lopen. Wat wil een vakantieganger nog meer? "Dit is prima, zeker gezien de hoge benzineprijzen."

The last few years of highly accessible short form video platforms have led to a boom time of aggrieved parents reacting to their estrangement from their adult children. (Reasonable viewers might catch some trends that clarify key issues that may have contributed to said estrangement.) YouTubers have of course reacted to this content, and you can catch up on EstrangementTok here: video 1, video 2, specific video on "Doormat Mom".

Capitalizing on the zeitgeist, this week, Fox News dropped an article called Cut off by your adult child? Psychology researcher reveals what parents should do next which started making the "do they not realize the irony? ..?" internet rounds yesterday. The Fox News website comments are really where this article shines. You can find an archive link to the article here (scroll down for archived comments), see some screenshots here on this reddit post, or go directly to the Fox News website to see it yourself here. The Fox News article itself is immaterial; it's the vitriol in the parents' reactions to it that are interesting. On a positive note: every time something like this pops off, more adult "children" in this situation are able to find community.

The star of Girls and The Book of Mormon talks about coming out, turning a showmance into a romance, and going toe to toe with the West Wing’s Allison Janney in new film Miss You Love You

Imagine a cute, young, gay Jim Carrey with a withering line in put-downs: that is Andrew Rannells. Or rather, it was, back when he starred in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls as Elijah, the formerly closeted ex of her character, Hannah. Dunham had seen Rannells playing Elder Price, the zealous missionary spreading the good word in the original 2011 Broadway production of the bad-taste musical The Book of Mormon, for which he received a Tony nomination. Girls, in turn, spread the good word about him. To this day, fans still shout “Your dad is gay!” at him in the street, a call-back to the moment when Elijah tartly advises Hannah that she might want to fine-tune her gaydar.

It is an older, gentler, salt-and-pepper-bearded Rannells who stars in the comedy-drama Miss You, Love You. He plays Jamie, a personal assistant arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to shepherd the spiky and recently widowed Diane (Allison Janney) through the initial weeks after her husband’s death from Parkinson’s. As it dawns on them that Diane’s son – Jamie’s employer – may not make it to his stepfather’s funeral, these strangers navigate their way through the grey area of their flung-together friendship.

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Confidence in an organization's cyber recovery capabilities deserves scrutiny. If a ransomware attack disables the SaaS data tenanted in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, the data the business depends on as its lifeblood, the pace at which operations resume rests on assumptions that often prove wrong. Anyone whose answer is "It's all good. Microsoft has my back on this one with its comprehensive native retention and recovery capabilities" is due a reality check. With agile business tools like M365 and Entra ID and solid backend infrastructure in the form of Azure, Microsoft brings a lot to the SaaS party. Both IT departments and MSPs need to be aware, however, that Redmond operates on the same shared responsibility model as other major SaaS providers. In the event of a cyberattack, the recovery burden splits between what the cloud provider handles and what falls to the subscriber alone. MSPs face the additional pressure of meeting stringent SLAs, working with clients’ preferred providers or tooling, and managing their own staffing and profitability accordingly. Microsoft ensures that its services keep running in the aftermath of a strike but does not promise to restore data to a specific known good point before the disaster. That gap always sat with the customer, and planning for it before problems hit beats improvising while picking up the pieces. "There's a common misconception about what Microsoft is responsible for, as distinct from the service they're providing," explains Brent Torre, GM of cyber resilience . Microsoft's native tools, he points out, address problems like short-term accidental deletion and aspects of data governance. They are not a backup solution and will not protect against ransomware or recover data. "Microsoft is clear that whether it's a SaaS application like Microsoft 365, a platform application like SQL Server, or even VMs running in Azure, the customer is always responsible for the information that's in that service, as well as devices, accounts and identities," he adds. "If you get compromised and the attacker starts deleting data, Microsoft has no responsibility for that." A world of pain The gap between availability and true cyber recovery is misunderstood, and it has widened into something of a chasm in recent years. There are three contributing factors to this gap. The first is the evolution of cyberattacks. Typical cyberattacks have pivoted from muscling past a defensive barrier to targeting human weakness, because strolling in through the front entrance with a stolen pass is easier than shimmying through a forced window. Identity has become the primary attack surface. Credential compromise, or identity-based initial access, removes the need to find a vulnerability to exploit and requires only an unwary employee. AI is now a staple weapon in the criminal arsenal, augmenting exploitation techniques such as phishing, social engineering, deceptive emails and spoofed websites, all convincingly used to trick users into typing passwords into a portal controlled by the aggressor. The technique can get more scientific than that. Automated AI-powered bots test millions of leaked username and password pairs across hundreds of different websites, exploiting the common habit of password reuse. Microsoft Entra ID, the vendor's cloud-based identity and access management service and the very tool designed to keep criminals out, is now a prime vector for attack and no match for stolen identity. Once an attacker compromises Entra ID with pilfered credentials, without setting off alarms, they have a free run at gathering data from mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and other soft targets. The ransomware attack itself can then be launched with ease and at leisure. Another contributory factor is that the vogue for moving workloads to infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) models shows no sign of abating. Organizations tend to retain some functions on-premises, put some in SaaS applications, and others in cloud environments, but are often guilty of not protecting and managing everything to the same level of quality. Data gets backed up in a variety of locations, yet whether it is all equally recoverable in the event of a breach is another chink in the armor that nobody understands. The 'as a service' model is popular, but it is the weak link when ransomware strikes. The third part of the problem is the emergence of multiple compliance requirements mandating cyber resilience along with correct backup and recovery procedures, for which many organizations are ill-prepared. Together, these pressures give criminals room to do enormous harm to data, business operations and compliance posture in the gap between attack and restoration of SaaS availability. Given that Microsoft's native retention and recovery capabilities are not designed to deliver true cyber resilience, restoring the business to how it was before the attack is something to plan for in advance. Time for independent backup protection "At Kaseya we regularly recommend that you keep a copy of your data, independent of the primary environment it's operating in," advises Torre. "This needs to be something immutable that you can recover from even if the Microsoft or Google or Salesforce ecosystem goes down." This kind of protection is best delivered as a dedicated cloud-to-cloud backup solution stored outside the main SaaS tenant, he argues, an approach increasingly written into cyber insurance and compliance requirements. By pulling copies of regularly targeted data from the Microsoft tenant for storage offsite in a third-party datacenter, organizations can be sure that if SaaS credentials are compromised, critical assets remain safe from attack. Restoration can then push what is needed directly back into the SaaS environment, even where the original tenant has been destroyed. "In fact some people find it faster to stand up a new shell and rebuild it than try to gain access back into a compromised tenant," notes Torre. "Whether you're an internal IT technician, working the night shift, or an MSP needing to live up to your SLAs and maintain profitability, you require a solution that's super straightforward and you need to be able to trust that the recovery will work. Both IT departments and MSPs should be looking out for a solution that's incredibly easy to use. Disaster recovery isn't the only job that they have." A good platform, he says, focuses not just on guaranteeing recovery but on keeping the hygiene of the cyber resilience estate at a high standard without endless human intervention. It should also make certain that Microsoft 365 and Entra ID are restored together in a single workflow, so identity and the data it grants access to come back online in the right order rather than in separate stages. Choosing the right platform Datto is a cybersecurity and data protection business owned by Kaseya. Datto SaaS Protection for Microsoft 365, Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure, and Datto Backup for Microsoft Entra ID are designed between them to close the gap between availability and recovery by storing protected copies of tenant data in the Datto Cloud, outside the Microsoft environment. In this way a compromised production tenant does not take the recovery point down with it. "With our M365 backup, we're protecting one million users worldwide," claims Torre. "A lot of organizations have built trust around our ability to protect and recover their data. We offer a trusted platform for recovery that focuses on ease of recovery, ease of deployment, not just for M365 but for Azure and Entra ID too." Both IT bosses and MSP players need to recognize that a ransomware attack, or other cyber crisis, is a matter of when rather than if. Recovery matters more than protection, because protection is certain to fail at some point, and traditional approaches to backing up data are no longer sufficient on their own. Anticipating disaster is not enough; the organization also needs to be set up to withstand it. That means being as certain as possible that the Microsoft environment can be recovered rapidly, down to the last scrap of data. This capability underpins modern business workflows and operations. Microsoft tracks more than 4,000 identity attacks every second and analyzes 38 million identity risk detections daily — no organization is off the target list. When an attack lands, the restoration clock is already ticking, and any delay in fully restoring IT operations and key environments to their pre-attack state can mean the difference between survival and collapse, with profit, regulatory standing and reputation all riding on the outcome. Securing data with purpose-built cyber resilience platforms that enable rapid, clean recovery is how organizations meet that test. MSPs looking to close the gap can start with the Datto MSP Buyer's Guide to Microsoft Entra ID Backup Sponsored by Datto.

G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost. “G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?”

WARSCHAU (ANP/AFP/DPA) - De Poolse geheime dienst heeft een Rus opgepakt die van plan zou zijn geweest om een Oekraïens-Amerikaanse man te vermoorden. Volgens de regering werkte de verdachte in opdracht van Rusland en was het beoogde slachtoffer een doorn in het oog van het Kremlin en de Russische president Vladimir Poetin.

"Dankzij een bliksemsnelle actie konden we deze liquidatie voorkomen", aldus premier Donald Tusk. Volgens de regering had de aanslag plaats moeten vinden in Warschau, maar kon de Rus vorige week al worden opgepakt. Bij de operatie werd samengewerkt met de Amerikaanse geheime dienst.

Tusk verklaarde dat dit de eerste keer zou zijn geweest dat iemand uit Rusland in NAVO-gebied een aanslag probeerde te plegen op een Amerikaanse staatsburger.

In juni werd in Polen ook een bekende Russische Kremlin-criticus doodgeschoten. Tusk sprak destijds van een politiek gemotiveerde moord. Een verdachte werd aangehouden.

​Om de De Speld Krant binnenkort te lanceren zijn we nog op zoek naar 750 abonnees. Dit is de lijst van type mensen die we zoeken, als je er tussen staat graag even abonnee worden.

Mensen die The Odyssey prachtig vonden maar de vrouwelijke rollen minder goed uitgewerkt

Mensen die weer of brandweer altijd naar het zuiden trekken in de zomervakantie

Mensen die bolognese chips de lekkerste chips vinden

Mensen die lekker de boel de boel laten

Mensen die zoiets hebben van nou ja dat had voor mij niet per se gehoeven maar ik vind het ook niet erg

Mensen die 'hiero' in plaats van 'hier' zeggen

Mensen die vroeger een cavia hadden

Mensen die op volwassen leeftijd weleens een Fristi bestellen

Mensen die liever wandelen dan hiken

Mensen die niet precies weten hoe ze ‘eminence grise’ uitspreken

Mensen die dit jaar niet meer de Iron Man gaan doen

Mensen met een hart van goud

Mensen met een ruwe bolster, maar een blanke pit

Mensen die niet te beroerd zijn

Mensen die de beproevingen in het gelaat durven te zien

Mensen die slecht tegen feedback kunnen

Mensen die van geen ophouden weten

Mensen die de klok hebben horen luiden, maar niet weten waar de klepel hangt

Mensen die je vader hadden kunnen zijn

Mensen die niet op een uurtje meer of minder kijken

Mensen die ‘snuit’ zeggen in plaats van ‘toet’

Mensen die er voor uitkomen dat ze zin hebben in vlaai

Mensen die het ook allemaal niet meer weten

Mensen die het zich volledig eigen hebben gemaakt

Mensen die er niet van opkijken

Mensen die anderen mensen tegen het harnas jagen

Mensen die luttele seconden na het afsluiten van een app weer dezelfde openen

Mensen die er geen kaas van hebben gegeten

Mensen die er kaas van hebben gegeten

Mensen die er wel of geen chocola van kunnen maken

Mensen die eerlijk met je gaan zijn

Mensen die niet voor je gaan liegen

Mensen die er wel een boek over kunnen schrijven

Mensenmensen

Mensen die zeggen dat ze lekker veel sporten tegenwoordig

Mensen die B&B Vol Liefde niet op Videoland, maar televisie volgen

Mensen die geen Victor Vlam heten

Mensen met een eclipsebril in huis

Kijk de lijst nog even goed door of je ertussen staat. Als je er niet tussen staat, willen we je voorlopig even niet meer zien.

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