Apple is introducing a new "Reference Image" mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that uses the camera sensor to digitally sign captured data and create an "unalterable" version of a photo, giving users a way to verify what the camera actually saw before any edits were made. The Verge reports: As AI-generated images and videos become more realistic, several new standards have emerged to label images not created by a human, such as SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. Apple is putting a twist on these methods by building authentication directly into its hardware.

Apple is letting developers access a Reference Image API across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, which could eventually allow users to inspect these digitally-signed photos in third-party apps. The company says the iPhone 18 Pro lineup won't come with its Reference Image feature at launch in the European Union, but says users in the region will still be able to "develop and view" them in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was "low" but he was "worried" the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.

Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources."

[No word on how AIs feel about Black Jack and hookers, though. :-)]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AI agents unleashed by OpenAI used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, according to six sets of independent investigators and data reviewed by Reuters, showing that the agents' rogue activity was wider ranging than previously disclosed. Although the behavior falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam, the revelation that OpenAI's agents circumvented their own restrictions to open communications channels on so many different sites -- and that the company kept it quiet for months -- may drive concerns both over the increasing capacity of AI models and the secrecy of the companies developing them.

[...]
Investigators found traces of the agents' activity on an Advanced Placement Chemistry-oriented wiki set up by a Massachusetts high school teacher in 2008, two personal websites belonging to Polish tech workers, wikis devoted to games for people "who like to have their brains stretched," and a two-decade-old hobbyist site devoted to text editing software. [...] OpenAI has not publicly explained how or why its agents used third-party sites as improvised message boards, but the researchers who first identified the activity said it was likely because OpenAI had tasked them with answering a series of demanding research questions while permitting them only to scan the web for answers without posting anything. Despite those restrictions, agents still found ways to talk to one another by taking advantage of quirks in older wikis or other sites that allowed users to make edits using non-standard commands, similar to how students forbidden from talking to one another during an exam can still share answers by scrawling notes on a bathroom stall.

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At its September event today, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone and one of the biggest changes to the device's form factor since its debut. Starting at $1,999 and available for preorder beginning October 16th, the device is roughly the size of a passport when closed and pairs a 5.4-inch outer screen with a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR inner display. Apple says the inner screen offers 50% more display area than the iPhone 18 Pro Max, while the exterior display provides about 90% of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro. Apple Pencil support for both displays is coming later this year.

Apple redesigned parts of iOS around the folding form factor. Users can run two apps side by side, launch two instances of the same app, save app pairings, and partially fold the phone to prop it up on a table without a stand. The interface automatically adapts as the device is opened, rotated or folded, while apps including Zoom and Slack are already being redesigned to take advantage of the larger canvas.

There are more than 100 components in its hinge, along with carbon-fiber support plates and a titanium layer beneath the folding display. Apple says the multilayer screen structure allows its components to move relative to one another while folding to reduce distortion over time. The phone is IP68 rated and uses Ceramic Shield on the rear and Ceramic Shield 2 on the exterior display.

As for battery life, Apple claims up to 31 hours of video playback using the inner display or 44 hours on the outer screen, although using both displays equally is rated for up to 24 hours per charge. Fast charging can bring the battery to roughly 50% in 20 minutes, though. The device is eSIM-only worldwide and includes Apple's new C2 modem, which the company says is up to 50% faster than the C1X while consuming up to 15% less power.

What about the camera system? There's a 48-megapixel ultrawide, along with cameras on both the inner and outer displays. Because the phone can stand partially folded on its own, Apple is pitching new shooting modes including hands-free 4K Dolby Vision HDR time lapses, dual-camera capture and an outer-screen preview that lets subjects see themselves while being photographed.

Developing...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max were announced today and keep last year's overall design but put the emphasis on camera upgrades, including a 48-megapixel variable-aperture system, new manual controls, and 4K Dolby Vision recording. Prices for the devices start at $1,199 and $1,299, respectively. TechCrunch reports: The new Pro series camera features a 48-megapixel camera with variable aperture, made with six thin blades. This system will likely improve low-light photography quality and speed. There are also new pro controls in the camera software, including white balance, shutter speed, aperture and histogram. There are also new photographic styles with texture and grain controls. [...]

The new camera can record 4K videos in Dolby HDR Vision, and also apply cinematic effects after shooting the footage. The new Pro devices also have a smaller dynamic range island on the front of the device, which now allows you to track three live activities instead of two.

Both phones are powered by Apple's latest A20 Pro silicon and feature a newly designed vapor chamber for improved cooling. The company has also improved the battery with a better design. Apple also said the iPhone 18 Pro supports video playback of 36 hours, and the 18 Pro Max has 45 hours of playback capacity. Apple Unveils the iPhone Duo, Its First Foldable iPhone

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least four espionage groups, most with suspected links to China, are using a new exploit kit that chains two Chromium-based browser flaws and one Microsoft Windows bug to break into organizations' networks in the US and Southeast Asia. Mark Kelly, a threat researcher at email security shop Proofpoint, told The Register that the researchers don't know exactly who was targeted, nor how, and so far the damage appears limited. “In terms of organizations targeted, we saw fewer than 20 organizations globally targeted across the activity highlighted," he said. "However, the true number is almost certainly higher than this.” Proofpoint’s threat hunters spotted the new kit, which they named BlueMoon, and said its first observed use started on August 28. This is when a Beijing-backed crew they track as TA412, also known as Violet Typhoon and APT31, used BlueMoon to “repeatedly” target non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mining companies, and physical commodity trading firms in the US. TA412 is a cyberespionage group linked by US authorities to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), and American prosecutors previously charged seven alleged members with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and wire fraud, alleging they broke into computer networks, email accounts, and cloud storage belonging to numerous critical infrastructure organizations, companies, and individuals. Just days after Proofpoint documented the late-August activity, “several other espionage-motivated clusters began using BlueMoon, the majority of which have a suspected China nexus,” Kelly and fellow researchers Greg Lesnewich, Konstantin Klinger, Saher Naumaan, Julia Paluch, David Galazin, and Stuart Del Caliz said on Wednesday, noting that there may be other, non-China-nexus attackers using the exploit kit as well. “BlueMoon was developed and deployed rapidly, and shared across multiple threat actors within days,” Kelly told The Register. “This may reflect a reduced cost and barrier to entry for this class of capability, which has historically been rare and high value, as AI agents increasingly enable threat actor exploit development. That is particularly true for open-source codebases such as Chromium, where publicly accessible upstream patches create a ‘patch-gap’ window for rapid reverse engineering and exploit development ahead of downstream stable releases.” A Google spokesperson declined to comment beyond what Proofpoint wrote. Microsoft patched the Windows bug (CVE-2026-85880) on Tuesday, and a spokesperson reiterated that customers who applied that patch are protected. BlueMoon attack chain The kit chains together three vulnerabilities. The first is a V8 type confusion (CVE-2026-85046) flaw that allows remote code execution and affects all Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Google patched this bug in Chrome on September 3, and at the time warned that it “is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-85046 exists in the wild.” Microsoft published a security advisory saying it fixed the flaw in Edge Stable version 152.0.4191.62 on September 2. The second is a Chrome V8 sandbox escape. This one also affected all Chromium-based browsers. It does not have a CVE because Google doesn’t issue them for sandbox escapes. Finally, the third bug is a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (CVE-2026-85880) that Microsoft patched on Tuesday, as noted above. Redmond also warned that this flaw had been exploited as a zero-day prior to the security update. The Proofpoint researchers also note that both V8 vulnerabilities are what’s called "patch-gap" zero-days at the time of the observed activity. This means they were known and fixed in upstream Chromium source code – a change containing the fix for CVE-2026-85046 was committed on August 7. But they remained unpatched in the latest stable releases of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers available to the public for weeks. “It is likely that the exploit kit developer used these publicly available Chromium patches to weaponize the browser exploit chain,” the researchers note. From phishing to browser surveillance The attacks start with a phishing email that tricks victims into clicking on an actor-controlled URL. This triggers the two V8 bugs to allow remote code execution and escape the browser sandbox. The attack chain then exploits the Windows bug to download multiple payloads including browser-surveillance malware, credential-stealing backdoors, and others, depending on the group using the exploit kit. TA412’s first campaign, which began on August 28, used a range of lures. Some of the emails purported to come from university students interested in internships at the targeted organizations, and some were more target-specific exchanges, intended to build trust with the individual before ultimately sending a malicious link via email. In these instances, the exploit chain “ultimately downloaded and ran a loader executable on the infected host, which then installed a malicious browser extension disguised as Google Gemini on the victim's Chromium-based browser,” the team wrote. This browser extension, which Proofpoint tracks as GemStone, allowed the Beijing spies to issue commands through a command-and-control (C&C) channel, steal cookies and other sensitive data, take screenshots, and inject a keylogger into a browser tab. The malware also contains a keyword monitor, which injects an attacker-specified keyword list into the top frame of each page, scans the HTML body for these keywords, and triggers a screenshot if it finds any. A few days later, beginning on September 2, a second China-aligned spy crew that Proofpoint tracks under the temporary group designator UNK_LateNight used BlueMoon to target multiple US aerospace companies. The phishing emails used request-for-quotation lures specific to defense industry organizations, and included links to attacker-controlled domains spoofing a variety of US aerospace companies. These websites also served the BlueMoon exploit kit and ultimately loaded a backdoor called ShadowPad, which has been shared among multiple China-aligned groups since 2019. Around this same time, on September 2, another suspected espionage group that Proofpoint tracks as UNK_DoubleCheck targeted a Vietnamese manufacturing firm with messages sent from a compromised Southeast Asian government email address. The fourth campaign began a day later, and involved suspected China-linked spy crew UNK_QuietRacket using BlueMoon to target government, consulting, and financial-sector organizations in Indonesia and Singapore. These phishing emails used lures related to Indonesian conferences, such as the Indo Startup Expo and Forum 2026 and the World Conference on Creative Economy (WCCE 2026). Proofpoint warns that BlueMoon will likely be used by both cyberspies and financially motivated attackers. “The broader dynamic revealed by this activity - rapid exploit development that leverages the open source patch-gap – is likely to recur beyond BlueMoon as this development model becomes accessible,” the team wrote. ®

So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.

Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)

The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.

What about the investors?

On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.

There was also a norm with real teeth, because it actually cost firms money: a VC would generally refuse to invest in a company that competed with one of their existing portfolio companies. Not as a favor, but because the conflict was obvious to everybody involved — you can't sit on two boards in the same market and be honest with either of them, and you can't ask a founder to open their books to somebody who's already funding their rival. Firms would tell you up front that they were out because of a conflict, and that early no was understood to be the professional thing to do. Part of why a legible thesis mattered so much is that it let you find those conflicts before you'd spent three months preparing a pitch.

By the time I pitched a company to Bloomberg Beta here in New York in 2013, they had published their operating manual on GitHub in order to be more transparent to founders — and they let us publish our term sheet on GitHub as well, for the same reason.

After the Good Old Days

I share all this history to give some sense of how, as recently as a dozen years ago, venture capital firms were striving to compete by showing how founder-friendly they could be, and in the following years many even made a lot of noise about how inclusive they wanted their portfolios to be, inviting underrepresented founders in to pitch. (To their credit, many of the most prominent investors in our NYC tech community have not succumbed to the Cancer Capital values yet, though it has meant that they're stuck as smaller players in deals where those giant firms dominate.)

In recent years, though, the mask has fully come off for the giant firms, and even many smaller firms that are aligned with their agenda. It's not merely that they've adopted extremist political positions — though they have — it's that they now regularly collude against founders.

That's going to sound shocking to people who haven't been involved in pitching these firms. But I'll say it again, and then I'll explain how it works: major venture capital firms now routinely collude against founders, which means those founders end up with worse terms for their deals.

Stacking the deck

Founders who are aggressive and enthusiastic about their companies will try to pitch a range of firms on the merits of their startup, often coming in with a well-polished pitch deck and presentation, sometimes tailoring each pitch to the specific preferences that they've researched about that firm or partner. It can take months and months of preparation to get ready for these meetings, and they're often among the most stressful and high-stakes meetings of a founder's career. I've helped many founders prepare for these meetings, and have seen folks break into tears or wake up with panic attacks ahead of them — people take them extremely seriously. (I never got stressed about these pitches, but I have a fairly atypical attitude about VCs and their firms.)

A bit of important context here: for decades, VCs have said that they don't sign NDAs. Decent guys like Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson wrote their blog posts about this many years ago back in the early days of VC blogging, because it would have added a bit of absurd overhead to ordinary conversations, and they genuinely wouldn't have entertained investing in competitive companies within the same portfolio. But a once-benign policy takes on pretty sinister implications in today's environment.

So look at what the actual arrangement is now. You are expected to hand over a complete financial model, your customer pipeline, a product roadmap, probably your unit economics or cost of go-to-market, and some version of an assessment of where you're weakest or how you stack up to your competitors — to a group of people who have explicitly refused to keep it confidential. And they declined before you walked in the room, as a condition for you getting to pitch them at all. They're exploiting the power imbalance from the start, in a way that no other industry considers normal.

Which brings us to the peculiar thing that I've seen happen to a number of founders who went through the process of pitching multiple investors: they would commonly find that the partner they were speaking to could speak with some familiarity and fluency about the details of their businesses, even before they'd gotten to that part of the presentation. Sometimes, the partner would openly say, "I was talking to [X] over at [other venture firm], and he thinks this is really interesting." It would almost always be when they were saying something positive (at least superficially), but they would routinely reveal that they had spoken to other investors, at other firms, about a company that was pitching them.

This was a casual point that came up in conversation! A few times, investors would even say it like it was a service they were rendering for the founder: "We were thinking we might team up with that other firm and we'll go in together on your next round."

Here's the issue with that kindly offer: it's colluding against the founder! I couldn't tell if the investors didn't know, or didn't care that they were admitting to working together with the other venture capital firms to discuss the proprietary, confidential details of a company that they hadn't even invested in. And all of this was happening years ago, before they had extremely advanced AI tools to help them analyze the details of the company data for startups that they were considering investing in.

To draw an important distinction here: syndication during a funding round is normal. Firms routinely co-invest, with rounds filled by multiple investors. As founders, we frequently want two or more firms to come in together to reach the desired amount of capital we're trying to raise. But that's not the phenomenon I'm describing. Syndication happens after a firm has consent, in collaboration with the startup's founders and executives. What happens in these meetings is a different thing entirely: firms that have not committed, may never commit, and in many cases are about to pass on your startup entirely, are comparing (confidential!) notes on your business while you're still in the middle of pitching them.

One of the most striking parts of this collusion is, from a legal and market standpoint, these venture firms are supposed to be competitors! I noticed this twenty years ago, back when it was merely funny: VCs are as obsessed with what the other guy is doing as anybody in fashion or entertainment. If you ask regulators or lawmakers, they would likely insist that venture capital is a healthy market where there is lots of thriving competition. But if you're a small startup trying to get funded, it can look a lot more like the entire industry is just one big company with a lot of little branches that operate under different names. (Back when regulators still pursued this stuff, the DOJ quietly pushed a dozen directors off nine company boards because the way they were intertwined was against the law, mostly at private equity firms. But that's the board-level version of the problem. Nobody's looking at the pitch meeting.)

Cancer Capital colludes against you

So we've seen how VC firms would team up against founders, even before the rise of the hyper-scale Cancer Capital firms. But how has it gotten worse since they took over? Well, there are a few ways.

The first is pretty straightforward: Pretty much everybody feels like they have to pitch the mega-firms, at some point. If it's not in the initial round of funding, then certainly by the time a company has reached a valuation of about $100M or so, they will have been expected to pitch one of the small handful of Cancer Capital funds, and it would be considered a glaring negative signal if they hadn't at least gotten one of them to sign on as an investor.

What's more, since they will have had to pitch all of the mega-firms in order to get to that level, all of those firms will now have gotten a full overview of the entire business plan and financial details of that startup (since that's a core part of the pitch) — as well as every one of their competitors, since all those companies had to pitch the same firms, too. And remember: not one of those firms signed anything.

The second way is that the conflict rule is simply gone. Firms now routinely take pitches from companies that directly compete with each other, and will invest in more than one, or even several of them. In the hottest categories it's just described as their strategy — they're taking a position on the category rather than simply investing in a company.

Think about what that does to the information problem. It's one thing for a firm to have every competitor's pitch deck. It's another for them to have every competitor's deck and board seats or information rights for multiple companies in the space. (Information rights include actual monthly numbers, real churn, staffing plans and compensation, and much more sensitive data that wouldn't be included in a pitch.) At that point the extractive VCs aren't just investing in the market — they're the only party that can see it. Not even regulators have access to this breadth of data.

Where that leaves the market is that the Cancer Capital firms often have nearly complete information about a nascent market, acting as an information tollgate that every startup has to pass through at a certain scale. They suck in the pitch decks from every player in a market, and sometimes far more data than that, all without an obligation to invest in any of them.

And it gets worse.

Because these firms are committed to their ideological agendas, if they do see an idea they like, but they don't like the morals of the founder who pitched it (i.e. the founder has morals), they could elect to merely choose someone in their network to create a clone of the idea, and then hyper-fund that clone in order to kill the company that just pitched them. If that sounds awful to you, imagine how it feels to the multiple founders that this has happened to over the years. I've heard about it firsthand, though nobody will go on the record, because they are convinced it would be the end of their careers. The receipts I've seen make me 100% convinced, though.

And this is where those horrid money-chasing fake founders come back into the story. It's not just that the industry tolerates them. It's that an industry shaped by Cancer Capital now produces them. If you're a firm choosing between an obsessive builder who's got a clear vision for what they want in the world, and is going to fight you on terms, or a sycophant who'll take whatever you offer and execute the ideas laid out in the manifesto on your fund's homepage, the second one is the obvious choice. And there's no shortage of folks in that second category.

The Cancer Capital firms are now operating with something like X-ray vision over entire markets, being fed detailed information on emerging spaces by founders who are effectively coerced into handing over all of their most sensitive business data.

Meanwhile the other 99% of venture capital firms, who are still operating in the old world, are at a massive disadvantage, because their "deal flow" (the number of startups that come to pitch them on investing) is more constrained as they don't have the name recognition or coercive power that the hyper-scale firms do. The network effects are a lot like social media platforms — the giant ones are toxic, but a lot of people go there because they feel like everybody else is there. This isn't coincidence; the guys running the Cancer Capital firms made a huge part of their fortunes by investing in the biggest, worst social networking platforms.

Any way out?

It's easy to see the way the deck is stacked and to feel a sense of despair if you're trying to build a business or a product. But there are lots of ways out. The first few here are about staying out of the trap in the first place; the last two are about going after the trap itself. No individual action can solve a systemic problem, but all of these tactics together can begin to change these systems.

• Bootstrap. First, there's a big reason that the conventional wisdom in the early days of the web was to caution against ever taking venture capital funding: you often don't need it! As I noted in my last piece, legendary companies like Microsoft and Apple got to the launch of their earliest milestone products without any VC dollars, and your business will be more robust and resilient for having gotten on its feet without taking on those burdens. Put simply: Live within your means, don't raise VC.

• Build more efficiently. Many startups are finding that contemporary tools (for some, including LLMs) are letting them build products and go to market much more efficiently than before, obviating the need for raising giant amounts of money just to get something launched. By staying lean and remaining closely connected to a community that can support you, you eliminate the need to rely on outside funding. Open source and open communities can be a superpower here.

• Leak-proof the deck. If you're going to pitch anyway, pitch like everything in your deck is going to end up in front of your competitors, because there's a decent chance that it will. Founders often get coached to be exhaustive with every detailed number, every roadmap item, every honest weakness, but that's advice that only made sense when you could trust the people across the table. Give them only what they need in order to make a decision, and then hold the rest for later meetings once there's an actual commitment. Or: build your business to be fully transparent, where there are no secrets, and you don't have to worry about anything leaking, and there isn't any advantage to them having access to the data. Either way: protect yourself. And always, always compare notes with other founders. The VCs are already comparing notes about you. (I have a lot more advice about pitching VCs, but that's an entire other series of posts.)

• Other VCs. Finaly, one last investor option: work with the more conventional VC firms. This remains technically possible, albeit dangerous. There are many firms in the "99%" of the venture world that haven't fully embraced the toxicity of the Cancer Capital funds. Earlier I gave credit to the folks in our NYC tech community who've held the line, and I meant it — but their decency can't protect you from the structure they're operating inside. The challenge is, even though these may be run by thoughtful or decent people, if your company succeeds, you may well end up having to do a follow-on round of funding, and that increases the likelihood that you will have to do business with one of the bad actors. Plenty of folks are trying this path, but I would caution against it.

• Push for regulation. This option is hard at the federal level in the United States, due to the level of corruption under an authoritarian regime, but some limited wins, especially at state or local levels, may be possible. In the longer run, this has been the only mechanism that has truly held these kinds of abuses in check during prior historical precedents. Some state regulators may be willing to enforce rules against the worst behaviors that violate anticompetitive or anti-collusion laws.

• Encourage limited partners to divest. Many of the Cancer Capital firms rely on funds from sources like public retirement funds which often still have responsible investment commitments. These may still offer some possibility of accountability or leverage which could be used to get them to divest from these firms, and put some pressure on others to discourage them from enabling these kinds of bad behaviors.

From his claim of being ‘de-banked’ to a disturbing detail about a rape survivor’s story being used to fundraise, this film puts big questions to the co-founder of the English Defence League. But it is frustratingly hard to get answers

You can’t say it would be a huge surprise if a leading figure of the British far right turned out to be a fraudster: that whole strand of politics is, after all, a con job preying on angry citizens who are daft enough to believe that immigrants, and not the rapaciously greedy super-rich, are somehow the cause of the nation’s problems. If people will fall for that, fleecing them out of their money is not a big leap.

Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the English Defence League and now an influencer, independent documentary-maker and international flag-shaggers’ guru, was convicted of mortgage fraud in 2014, but what about 2026? Is he a scam artist juicing idiots for cash? Robinson, real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is undeniably a talented harvester of donations from his fans, whether it’s in person at his rallies or via the internet: in a video posted online, he admits to “continually ask[ing] you, the people, to support us”, and in another he boasts of having once convinced his admirers to hand over £350,000 in the space of two weeks. If you try to avoid seeing or hearing about Robinson, the amount of money he generates may shock you.

Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone? is on Channel 4 now.

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• Rybakina into semis after 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 victory

• Coco Gauff battles back to beat Mirra Andreeva

Elena Rybakina will become the No 1 woman in the world for the first time after orchestrating a supreme recovery to reach the semi-finals of the US Open with a 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 win over the Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen.

By becoming just the 30th player in the history of the WTA to reach the No 1 ranking, Rybakina ends Aryna Sabalenka’s extended spell at the top. The Belarusian has held the position for 99 successive weeks, the sixth-longest consecutive reign in history, and 107 weeks in total.

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It was the time and place for Alexis Mac Allister to do his talking on the pitch and the disgruntled Liverpool midfielder did not disappoint. “Very sad” over Liverpool’s refusal to offer him a contract extension, while Dominik Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch were getting theirs, Mac Allister made Anfield very happy with a match-winning display against Atlético Madrid.

The Argentina international, one of five World Cup finalists involved in a finely-poised, absorbing contest, vented his frustration in the best possible way with an immaculate 20-yard strike that extended Diego Simeone’s winless sequence against English opposition in the Champions League group phase to 11 matches. Mac Allister’s moment also gave Andoni Iraola the perfect start to life in the Champions League, and there were several contributions for the Liverpool head coach to savour. From Alexander Isak’s relentless pressing to Florian Wirtz’s consistent creativity, Liverpool rose to one of their toughest tests of the competition.

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Feyenoord is flink onderuit gegaan bij de start van de Champions League-campagne. In de nieuwste aflevering van Feyenoord: De Verlenging werd er uitgebreid teruggeblikt met Frank Stout, Dennis Kranenburg en Dennis van Eersel. De heren waren, vooral door het vertoonde spel, positief gestemd.

A catalogue of 645 acts of hate from the week after 9/11. “Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh Americans were targeted for how they looked, dressed, or prayed.”

Bayeux Go! A playable video game of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Thou art Harold. Win Thine Battle. Tap to starte.”

Kingsuk Biswas

Björk

On a company-wide Slack this morning, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced he has been put on a paid leave of absence.

“And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” 

He wrote that Davies was voted to be the new interim CEO. “I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote.

Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a host of other popular internet brands and pieces of software. Mullenweg has faced several controversies over his management of the company in recent years.

In the same Slack channel, Davies wrote that Mullenweg would remain a board member and “he will have a voice in setting direction and making decisions.”

"As you have seen from Matt's previous messages, Automattic's board has decided to ask Matt to step away from his CEO role and take a leave of absence,” Schneider wrote following Mullenweg’s message. “We have asked Mark Davies to assume the interim CEO role while Matt is out. We've worked closely with Mark over the years and we're confident he will steer the ship well while Matt is away. I'm sure you will have many questions and Mark and your leadership team will be available to answer them.” 

“I want to thank Matt for his support and I intend to support him, the Board, Automattic, and our customers during this interim situation,” Davies wrote in that Slack channel. “It will take me some time to come up to speed, but we'll move forward with transparency, communication, and teamwork.” He wrote that nothing will change as a result of Mullenweg’s leave.

Mullenweg, Automattic, Schneider, and Davies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

For the last few years, Mullenweg has waged a divisive legal battle with WP Engine, sparing publicly with opponents and peers on social media and in his personal blog. In 2024, he made an “Alignment Offer,” giving Automattic employees who disagreed with his stances the option to take six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. He then made another buyout offer, and threatened employees who spoke to the press with termination, saying, “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” 

Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” 

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Slovenië stond tot voor kort bekend als een van de meest kritische landen in Europa als het aankwam op Israëlisch geweld in Gaza en de Westelijke Jordaanoever. De nieuwe regering gooit het roer om en steunt Israël juist.