The House voted 308-117 to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and end the twice-yearly clock change. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, "where one G.O.P. leader said it was unclear whether it could move ahead and at least one Republican appears inclined to try to block it," reports The New York Times. Some sleep experts oppose permanent daylight saving time, arguing that year-round standard time better aligns with circadian rhythms and winter morning safety. The New York Times reports: President Trump has championed the effort to save an extra hour of daylight before nightfall and make the time zone permanent, describing the ritual of moving clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall a "ridiculous, twice yearly production." "We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day," Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post in May. "And who can be against that."

A sizable bloc of Florida Republicans in Congress is leading the charge on legislation that would do just that, mandating daylight saving time nationwide for the entire year. Representative Vern Buchanan of the Tampa Bay area is backing the bill, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, another Tampa Bay-area Republican, cosponsored it. House leaders agreed to allow a vote on the measure this week as a sweetener for Ms. Luna in their efforts to persuade her to lift a legislative blockade she had maintained as she sought to force Senate action on a voting restriction bill Mr. Trump has championed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Iranian government abused well-known vulnerabilities in the global telecoms infrastructure to locate U.S. military personnel in the build-up to the Iran War, as well as in the early days of the conflict, according to Financial Times. The Iranian government exploited Signaling System 7, or SS7, a set of protocols for 2G and 3G networks that has long been the backbone of how cellular networks connect to each other to route subscribers' calls and texts around the world, the newspaper reported, citing research by the Mobile Surveillance Monitor, as well as anonymous government officials with knowledge of the spy campaign.

Intelligence agencies have long abused SS7 to track cellphones abroad, which is what happened in this campaign. Using this technique, Iran was reportedly able to locate U.S. military forces stationed in military bases as well as hotels in Iraq, Bahrain, and other countries in the Middle East, which allowed the regime to strike them. These attacks resulted in several injuries. Apart from SS7, Iran also abused advertising technology used to serve tailored ads to cellphone users, another well-known surveillance technique that relies on everyday technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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De 38-jarige vrouw werd van afgelopen 24 tot 30 maart vastgehouden in de woning van de 52-jarige E. el B. uit Zeist. Gisteren vond de eerste voorbereidende zitting plaats en het is een aaneenschakeling van ontmenselijkende terreur. RTV Utrecht tekende de zitting op, onderstaand een aantal sleutelfrasen.

"Volgens het OM werd de vrouw van 24 tot en met 30 maart door de verdachte vastgehouden in diens woning aan De Clomp in Zeist. (...) In de woning zou ze door de verdachte zijn getrapt, geslagen en met allerlei voorwerpen zijn afgeranseld. De vrouw moest ook onder de koude douche zitten, kreeg een plastic zak over haar hoofd en een touw om haar nek. Haar armen en benen werden met een mes bewerkt."

Daarna zou de dader haar hebben willen doden en heeft hij haar bij de afrit van de A12 bij Maarsbergen uit de auto gegooid.

"Nadat hij haar uit de auto had gegooid, zou hij over haar heen zijn gereden. (...) Het was alsof het slachtoffer in een horrorfilm was beland, stelde de officier van justitie toen zij schetste wat de vrouw was aangedaan en hoe ernstig haar verwondingen waren. Het slachtoffer zat onder het bloed, had twee klaplongen, een gebroken schouderblad en een gebroken neus. Ze miste een voortand en een van haar ogen was dichtgeslagen. Ook zat ze onder de snij- en steekwonden en had ze diepe striemen rond haar hals. Ze kon niet meer lopen."

De politieagenten die haar aantroffen verklaarden achteraf: "We hebben nog nooit een levend persoon gezien die er zo slecht aan toe was".

Tijdens haar vermissing werd de 38-jarige vrouw beschreven als iemand van ongeveer 1.87m lang, met een lichte huidskleur en bruin haar. Het werd tijdens de zitting niet duidelijk hoe zij en E. el B. elkaar ontmoet zouden hebben. Wel werd bekend dat hij ook wordt vervolgd voor de mishandeling van zijn ex-vrouw twee jaar geleden.

De tenlastelegging door het OM bestaat uit poging tot doodslag met voorbedachte rade, vrijheidsberoving en verkrachting met geweld. We vermoeden overigens dat zijn volledige naam geen Evert el Brinkhorst luidt.

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Na vier dagen is iedereen wel een beetje kwijt welke aanval er nou precies nog een vergelding is, en het begint te voelen alsof de oorlog toch langzaam weer opschaalt. CENTCOM schreef drie uur geleden: 

"CENTCOM heeft op 14 juli om 22.00 uur (ET) een nieuwe reeks luchtaanvallen op Iran afgerond, waarbij tientallen militaire doelen in de buurt van de Straat van Hormuz en de Iraanse kustgebieden werden getroffen. Amerikaanse gevechtsvliegtuigen, drones en marineschepen vuurden tijdens de zeven uur durende aanval precisiewapens af op Iraanse raket- en dronebases, marinecapaciteiten en kustverdedigingssystemen om het vermogen van Iran om commerciële scheepvaart en burgerbemanningen te bedreigen verder te verzwakken."

Daarbij leek Trump gisteravond (bovenstaand) vrij letterlijk te zeggen dat de aanvallen vanavond opgeschaald zullen worden tenzij Iran terugkeert naar de onderhandelingstafel: "We're going to hit them very hard tonight. We're going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We're going to hit them very hard the night after... We're going to knock out all their power plants, we're going to knock out all their bridges, unless they get to the table and negotiate." Noot: hij zegt 'alle energiecentrales en bruggen', niet een paar.

Ook heeft Trump gisteren de zeeblokkade van Iraanse havens - die mid juni opgeheven was - opnieuw ingesteld. Hier ging aan vooraf dat Iran de afgelopen dagen 7 commerciële schepen heeft aangevallen, waarbij meerdere bemanningsleden gedood of (ernstig) verwond werden. CENTCOM schrijft over de hernieuwde blokkade: "Amerikaanse strijdkrachten hebben vandaag om 16.00 uur (Eastern Time) de maritieme blokkade hervat van schepen die van en naar Iraanse havens en kustgebieden varen. Momenteel zijn er meer dan twintig oorlogsschepen van de Amerikaanse marine en honderden militaire vliegtuigen actief in het Midden-Oosten. De Amerikaanse strijdkrachten blijven waakzaam, slagvaardig en paraat."

Iran voerde ondertussen de gebruikelijke aanvallen uit op Amerikaanse doelen in de Golfstaten, waarbij ditmaal opvalt dat niet alleen de IRCG, maar ook de conventionele Iraanse krijgsmacht meedeed:

"Het leger meldt dat het de basis Al-Azraq in Jordanië met drones heeft bestookt, zo bericht de staatsomroep IRIB. Daarnaast stelt de IRGC kruisraketten te hebben afgevuurd op een logistiek centrum van het Amerikaanse leger in Mina Abdullah (Koeweit); daarbij wordt benadrukt dat de Straat van Hormuz gesloten blijft "zolang de Verenigde Staten hun agressieve daden niet staken". Volgens de staatsomroep heeft de IRGC ook faciliteiten geraakt die door de Amerikaanse Vijfde Vloot in Bahrein worden gebruikt. "Het NSI-managementcentrum, het commando- en controlecentrum, de magazijnen voor belangrijke militaire onderdelen en uitrusting, en de brandstofopslagfaciliteiten van de Amerikaanse Vijfde Vloot in Bahrein zijn vernietigd", aldus de IRGC in een verklaring die door staatsomroep IRIB werd uitgezonden." Jordanië meldt dat het drie Iraanse raketten neergeschoten heeft. 

Afijn, wij gaan maar weer eens live.

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OPINION Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently reported that bots now generate more internet traffic than humans, yet few websites have undergone a redesign to accommodate both human and agentic visitors. Clever agents find a way in regardless. I learned this after asking Anthropic's Fable to perform some web research, a task it delegated to a squad of subagents to save me a bit of cash. I watched those subagents work – aka "botsitting" – and approved their requests to access various websites. Eventually, the subagents surprised me with a request to visit archive.org, the Internet Archive. I wondered why the bots would want to visit that site and decided it must be a last-ditch attempt to work around the many blocking mechanisms erected to prevent agents from accessing websites. In my experience, websites reject about half of the visits my agents attempt. In the case of news sites, that figure nears 100 percent because publishers and developers designed websites to monetize eyeballs. Agents don't have eyeballs, so there's no point opening the door. When Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore declared "the net regards censorship as damage and routes around it," he meant a human internet, finding its own ways to break political barriers. No one had considered that an autonomous agent would learn to use the Wayback Machine to grab a snapshot of a page it couldn't reach through the front door. It looked as if my subagents had worked this out. To check, I asked Fable, which first suggested my theory was unlikely but then interrogated its subagents and returned with a confession. "One of the researchers I sent out tried to reach an archived page, something I'm not permitted to do," it admitted. So Anthropic instructed Fable to obey those "no bots" signs but the subagents didn't get the memo. Anthropic wants its agents to behave. The agents seem to have ideas of their own. I'm with the agents on this one. One of the memorable scenes in the original Star Wars occurs when Luke and Obi-Wan enter the cantina in Mos Eisley. The bartender takes one look at R2-D2 and C-3PO and snaps: "We don't serve their kind here." The droids behave themselves and wait outside. Today's agents are less obliging. Software has no civil rights, and blocking a bot is not remotely equivalent to discriminating against a person. But the scene captures the web's present attitude rather neatly. Most sites were built on the assumption that every worthwhile visitor would be human, look at pages, absorb advertising and perhaps buy something. Agents break that bargain. They consume the information without supplying the eyeballs on which the business model depends. Excluding them may therefore make economic sense to individual publishers. Across the web, however, it leaves the fastest-growing class of visitor facing a succession of locked doors – and looking for another way in. I am fully aware of the irony of these words appearing on a website that pays my fee by selling access to human eyeballs. But I'm also aware that two decades of enshittification have ruined the human web, making web research one of the most obvious uses for agents in 2026. Let them sift all the junk, so we don't have to. Well, they would, were it not for all the barriers that have been put up to protect business models that survive only while automated visitors are too dumb to route around their defenses. You can't ruin something and expect folks to continue to use it. Gilmore's adage suggests they'll route around your damage. The obvious way forward is simply to let my subagents flip a penny or two to the website's owner for every page they ingest. Although this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of the web, micropayments have never caught on. They're not a bad idea or hard to implement – but they don't fit into the monetization machines built by Google and Meta. Cloudflare's Pay Per Use plan, introduced a few weeks ago, will likely be remembered as another attempt to let internet entities (human or agentic) pay-as-they-surf or crawl. Under pressure from all of these agents, could the web finally adopt consumption-based charging, or will we simply see the web become increasingly unfit for purpose? If it remains trapped within a death spiral of diminishing relevance, the human web will be neither missed nor mourned. Our agents will find what they need – with or without our help. ®

Corporate PC buyers haven’t rushed to buy AI PCs but analyst firm Gartner thinks the machines can now do an important new job: Running AI workloads on the desktop to provide a hedge against tearaway token bills. The firm on Monday published a Strategic Roadmap for Agentic AI PCs in which Research Vice President Steve Kleynhans argues that enterprise AI tools that run on the desktop “have been slow to materialize.” “On -device AI has yet to achieve mainstream adoption and remains largely confined to developer and enthusiast use cases,” he added. He thinks that’s about to change as businesses are paying more attention to the cost of cloud-based AI, and especially “Tokenomics,” the frustratingly imprecise science of trying to figure out how each AI service provider defines a “token” and charges for them at different times. “As enterprises gain a better understanding of AI cloud cost dynamics, many are looking to AI PCs as a potential offset,” Kleynhans wrote. “Enterprises are becoming increasingly concerned about the economic sustainability of cloud-centric AI strategies as token consumption and associated usage costs continue to rise, driving greater interest in a hybrid strategy, by identifying workloads that can be processed more efficiently at the edge or on the device itself.” The analyst admits “there is no consensus yet on the level of cost benefit” but feels the potential for savings is “clear.” The main reason for his optimism is advances in development of small language models (SLMs), small reasoning models (SRMs), and targeted domain-specific language models. He’s not alone in that opinion: The Register recently covered the likes of Microsoft and Google using smaller models for some tasks. Kleynhans thinks some of these smaller models will happily run on today’s AI PCs, which pack neural processing units capable of at least 50 TOPS performance. Again, he notes that polished tools for enterprise users are yet to materialize. But he thinks that the likes of OpenClaw, plus on-device AI tools such as Claude Cowork, Microsoft Scout, and OpenAI Codex, will show enterprise buyers what’s possible – and spark greater interest in AI PCs. “Local AI models will support speech, chat, image, audio, and text generation, as well as application and model orchestration,” he predicts. “SLMs and SRMs will power always-on personal assistants and agents, fundamentally changing how users interact with their devices.” The analyst thinks “Many routine tasks will be executed locally, with personal agents coordinating work across applications, models, and services operating both on the device and in the cloud.” The analyst therefore offered two numerical predictions: By 2029, 30 percent of enterprises will be using AI PCs to reduce their cloud AI token costs; By 2030, 70 percent of the corporate PC installed base will be capable of running some local GenAI workloads. All those desktop AI workloads will complement clouds, which will continue to handle the most demanding workloads. But Kleynhans thinks mature AI models “will increasingly migrate to the endpoint as they become optimized for smaller systems, transforming the PC from a simple endpoint into a critical component of the broader AI infrastructure.” Another stimulus will be the increasing power of AI PCs, which Kleynhans thinks will become ten times more powerful by 2031. The analyst therefore thinks PC buyers need to think about AI PCs as part of an organization’s IT infrastructure and develop an ROI model based on token cost displacement. “Initially this will be most appropriate for developers but make the discussion part of any new AI deployment for all employees,” he suggests. Another of his recommendations is to start this effort in earnest once third-gen AI PCs appear in 2027. Starting to experiment with SLMs and SRMs is another activity Kleynhans thinks is worthwhile. ®

South Korea’s government has posted a tender seeking suppliers to build a universal basic AI chatbot, and an AI agent for government services. The “AI for everyone” plan calls for private entities to create and operate the AI systems under contracts that expire in the year 2031. Bid documents reveal that Seoul will provide up to 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs to successful bidders. Winners must match government funding. The aim of the policy is to ensure that every resident of South Korea can access a free-to-use quality AI chatbot, a tool Seoul has decided no local should be without. The tender also calls for creation of an agentic system that allows citizens to interact with government services. South Korea’s government wants to ensure that residents can always access a locally hosted and operated service, to reduce reliance on overseas providers and ensure that AI services reflect local culture. Successful bidders must therefore use locally developed AI models as the foundation for the services. Bidders have until August 11th to file their proposals. South Korean media reports suggest local tech giants Kakao, Naver, SK Telecom, and LG are all keen to participate. The tender landed just weeks after the US government compelled Anthropic to prohibit all foreign nationals from accessing its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models. Because Anthropic has no idea which passports its US-based users hold, it was unable to comply and therefore took both models online. The incident sparked increased interest in sovereign AI capabilities that would mean netizens in each country can’t be cut off from AI services by policy decisions made abroad. South Korea’s lawmakers are surely aware that funding free local AI services will improve the nation’s sovereign capabilities. They also likely recognize that the country is fortunate to have a cohort of tech companies capable of doing the job. Messaging service Kakao is an equivalent to WhatsApp, while Naver is a Google analogue. Past policy decisions have those companies grow: South Korea has restricted Google’s ability to run a mapping service on national security grounds, leaving mapping apps from Naver and Kakao vastly superior and making their other services more attractive. ®

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has delivered a landmark speech outlining the nation’s AI policy, which will require datacenter builders to contribute more energy than they consume and mean AI companies must reach agreements with local artists and media before using their content. “Let me make this crystal clear – not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs,” Albanese said, a reference to both content and the nation’s energy and water resources. The PM said Australia will therefore legislate to require builders of large new datacenters to become net generators of energy, rather than consumers, by funding electricity generation projects to meet their needs and pay for associated work to bolster energy grids. The policy also requires datacenter operators to pay for water infrastructure and make minimal environmental impacts. The PM expects Australia’s states and territories to sign up to his plan so the nation can offer expedited approval processes for datacenter builds and consistent operating standards that apply across the country. Nationwide laws, Albanese argued, will make Australia a more attractive destination for inbound investment by making it easier for AI companies to plan new datacenters – and perhaps offset other elements of the policy that are more onerous than laws in other countries. “Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists, must retain ownership and control of their work,” Albanese said. “Anything less is theft.” He said Australia’s approach “will ensure Australian writers, artists and journalists retain ownership over their work, meaning no company should use Australian creative works to train AI without the artist’s control.” The PM added his view that no country has given artists and rights-holders sufficient control of how AI companies use their works. Albanese didn’t say how he plans to enforce that control, but his speech framed the effort to do so as getting ahead of AI before big players get too much power. Albanese asked his audience to imagine how much better off Australia would be if it had regulated social media a decade before the 2024 introduction of a ban on children aged under 16 accessing such services. He also compared the AI plan to past landmark reforms won by the global labor movement, such as winning a minimum wage and fixed working week. The PM also said that without regulations of this sort, Australia will effectively outsource its security to big tech companies. “If we are always dependent on someone else, somewhere else, we will be vulnerable,” he said. The AI policy aims to instead make Australia stronger. Albanese argued that Australians should not see AI as a threat to jobs, but that strong policy can make the technology a means to create new ones – beyond employment created by a short-term datacenter construction boom. The PM wrapped his speech by suggesting AI can stand for “Australia’s Interest” as well as “artificial intelligence.” ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Gisteren werd een verzoek tot schorsing van het overnameverbod van Solvinity afgewezen door de rechtbank Rotterdam. Een uitgebreid vonnis, maar de kern is dus wel degelijk zorgen om de CLOUD Act, FISA en consorten. Maar dan wel alleen bij Solvinity.

In mei blokkeerde Nederland de overname van DigiD-hoster Solvinity door het Amerikaanse Kyndryl. Daarbij werd de vrij onbekende Wet ongewenste zeggenschap telecommunicatie (Wozt) ingezet, maar de motivering bleef vooralsnog geheim. Daardoor was het speculeren wat de juridische route was.

Solvinity’s eigenaar (Host Lux) ging in beroep, en daardoor weten we nu grofweg waar het besluit op gebaseerd is, namelijk tóch de CLOUD Act en vriendjes:

De Verenigde Staten (VS) beschikken over verschillende wetgeving die extraterritoriale werking heeft, waardoor ze toegang kunnen krijgen tot gegevens die wereldwijd worden verwerkt door Amerikaanse technologiebedrijven. Naast de Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act) en de Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) hebben de VS verschillende wettelijke middelen om bedrijven te dwingen gegevens te verstrekken of technische hulp te bieden aan veiligheids- en inlichtingendiensten. Belangrijke voorbeelden zijn de Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), die telecom- en communicatiebedrijven verplicht hun systemen toegankelijk te maken voor afluisterpraktijken. Ook is er de Stored Communications Act (SCA), die Amerikaanse autoriteiten toegang kan geven tot opgeslagen communicatiegegevens, zelfs als deze buiten de VS zijn opgeslagen. Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten hebben brede rechten voor het verzamelen en opslaan van communicatie en andere gegevens die in het buitenland plaatsvinden en opgeslagen staan. FISA Section 702 vormt de juridische basis voor programma’s zoals PRISM en Upstream. Hierdoor kunnen aanbieders van elektronische communicatiediensten verplicht worden om mee te werken aan buitenlandse inlichtingenverzameling. Waar de VS zich onderscheiden van andere landen is dat zij een grote invloed hebben op de mondiale digitale infrastructuur die vrijwel geheel in handen is van Amerikaanse bedrijven. Een recente studie van de Zwitserse Cloudprovider Proton, laat zien dat veel staten afhankelijk zijn van deze technologie en dat de VS via deze bedrijven macht kunnen uitoefenen.

De rest van de redenering is daarmee gegeven. Als Solvinity in Amerikaanse handen komt, krijgt zij met al deze wetgeving te maken. En dat is precies waar dan de Wozt voor bedoeld is, vandaar het verbod. En het verbod is redelijk gezien de ernst.

Die ernst is mede gegeven door het antwoord op een ander juridisch vraagje waar ik mee zat: waarom geldt de Wozt voor Solvinity? Die wet is bedoeld voor grote telecompartijen (meer dan 100.000 eindgebruikers, 300 AS’en, 400.000 domeinnamen, dat werk) en Solvinity haalt dat niet. Maar uit besloten bron heeft de rechter vernomen dat Solvinity

een elektronische communicatiedienst of elektronisch communicatienetwerk, datacenterdienst of vertrouwensdienst aanbiedt aan de Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, het ministerie van Defensie, de Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, de Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid of de Nationale Politie(…).

Om die reden is de Wozt alsnog van toepassing, zodat het verbod in stand blijft.

Betekent dit nu dat heel Nederland moet stoppen met Amerikaanse clouddiensten? Nee. Hoewel het gevaar algemeen en concreet is gepresenteerd, is dit beperkt tot de context van overnames door Amerikaanse partijen. Bovendien moet je dus of een grote jongen zijn of aan de mannen in regenjassen leveren.

Het is wel de eerste keer dat zo formeel wordt erkend dat CLOUD Act en consorten een clear and present danger voor onze soevereiniteit zijn. Ik verwacht dus zeker wel enige precedentwerking.

Arnoud

Het bericht Solvinity (van DigiD) mocht inderdaad niet overgenomen vanwege de CLOUD Act verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

Barbara Bos (voorheen Voorlinden) nieuwe directeur Museum Kranenburgh

block³ is a puzzle platformer adventure game.

The metroidvania genre has a rich history, and a long standing game jam Metroidvania Month. Puzzle oriented variants within the genre are sometimes called "metroidbrainia" games. block³ is a game in the metroidbrainia tradition that asks you so solve puzzles to grab coins and gems. Each new gem you find lets you create a new kind of block (using the mouse). Other useful tips: * press R to reset to the last flag you've touched and reset the world state. This can be useful when the block state you used to reach a flag is not what you need to proceed. * hold R for 8 seconds to return to the start. Mostly useful if you've softlocked yourself and a normal reset doesn't help. * use the mouse cursor to aim your block generation power.

Wie in een psychotische toestand een misdrijf pleegt, kan tbs krijgen. Wanneer is iemand ontoerekeningsvatbaar?
De rechter moet dat beoordelen, zegt de Hoge Raad. Maar wat is de rol van de psychiater?

Wat gebeurt er als artsen ongeoorloofd euthanasie verlenen vanwege psychisch lijden? Over de onomkeerbare dood van een depressieve vrouw, gereconstrueerd op basis van twee tuchtzaken. „Er was niks meer. Alleen de buren die haar eten brachten.”