US secretary of state says Zelenskyy’s claims ‘not true’ about Donbas; French TV criticised over Sergei Lavrov interview. What we know on day 1,494

US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, rejected Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s assertion that the Trump administration is demanding Kyiv hand over its eastern Donbas region to Russia to receive US security guarantees in any ceasefire plan. Speaking on Friday, Rubio disputed Zelenskyy’s recent comments and said the US has made no such stipulation in its talks with Ukraine. “That’s a lie,” Rubio said. “And I saw him say that. And it’s unfortunate he would say that because he knows that’s not true and that’s not what he was told.” Zelenskyy this week told Reuters the US was making its offer of security guarantees for Ukraine contingent on the ceding of the Donbas region, the industrial heartland long coveted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

French public television came under severe criticism on Friday for airing a prime-time interview with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. The France 2 television channel aired 10 minutes of the pre-recorded interview during its Thursday evening news, while the full hour-long version was posted online. More than four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine, Lavrov on France 2 claimed Moscow was intent on defending “international law”. Lavrov said US-Israeli strikes on Iran that sparked the Middle East war had breached these rules. But he rejected any notion of Russia breaking international law in Ukraine, claiming its forces never targeted “exclusively civilian” targets.

Ukraine’s ambassador to France, Vadym Omelchenko, said on X people must be wondering why French television had given a platform to “a war criminal”.

And the French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, responded by saying Russia does not defend international law either in Ukraine or Iran with its actions. “Mr Lavrov was able to calmly spread his propaganda last night on a French television channel … You do not defend international law by launching a war of aggression,” Barrot told reporters on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in France.

Meanwhile, Moscow has denied reports that Vladimir Putin asked Russian oligarchs to donate to fund the Ukraine war, as covered earlier by Nadeem Badshah. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said one of the businessmen at a closed-door meeting on 26 March proposed donating money to the state, and Putin welcomed this initiative.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said the US still has a critical role to play in ending the war with Russia, adding that he had met Rubio on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in France. “Ukraine’s proposals are realistic and doable. Pressure on Russia is key to make Moscow end the war,” Sybiha posted to X on Friday. “We also spoke about the developments in the Middle East. Ukraine’s position is that the regimes in Moscow and Tehran work together to prolong the war.” There are fears the US-Israeli war on Iran has diverted attention away from finding peace in Ukraine.

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Two others injured after sightseeing aircraft comes down on remote beach on Na Pali Coast

A tourist helicopter crashed on a remote beach off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, killing three people and injuring two others, authorities said.

The helicopter was carrying one pilot and four passengers when it crashed on Thursday afternoon at Kalalau Beach, the Kauai fire department said. The beach is on the Na Pali coast on Kauai’s north shore. The area is otherwise reachable only by hiking or boat.

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Actor outside Kennedy Center urges Americans to ‘stand tall against authoritarianism’ and resist free-speech threats

The actor Jane Fonda joined journalists, musicians and writers outside Washington’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in urging US citizens to “break your silence” and “stand tall against authoritarianism”.

At a damp but defiant rally hosted by Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment on Friday, around a hundred invited guests gathered to hear speakers and singers rail against book bans, political censorship and other threats to free speech under Donald Trump.

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Google has moved up its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029. "This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates," said vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg in a blog post. CyberScoop reports: Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers. While Google has said it is on track to migrate its own systems ahead of the 2035 timeline provided in NIST guidelines, last month leaders at the company teased an updated timeline for migration and called on private businesses and other entities to act more urgently to prepare.

Unlike the federal government, there is no mandate for private businesses to migrate to quantum-resistant encryption, or even that they do so at all. Adkins and Schmieg said the hope is that other businesses will view Google's aggressive timeframe as a signal to follow suit. "As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it's our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline," they wrote. "By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission is investigating a breach after a threat actor allegedly accessed at least one of its AWS cloud accounts and claimed to have stolen more than 350 GB of data, including databases and employee-related information. AWS says its own services were not breached. BleepingComputer reports: Sources familiar with the incident have told BleepingComputer that the attack was quickly detected and that the Commission's cybersecurity incident response team is now investigating. While the Commission has yet to share any details about this breach, the threat actor who claimed responsibility for the attack reached out to BleepingComputer earlier this week, stating that they had stolen over 350 GB of data (including multiple databases).

They didn't disclose how they breached the affected accounts, but they provided BleepingComputer with several screenshots as proof that they had access to information belonging to European Commission employees and to an email server used by Commission employees. The threat actor also told BleepingComputer that they will not attempt to extort the Commission using the allegedly stolen data as leverage, but intend to leak the data online at a later date.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

In de eerste test richting het WK van komende zomer, won het Nederlands elftal met 2-1 van Noorwegen. Wat viel er precies op?

Mijn vriendin en ik gaan altijd tegelijk naar bed. Meestal lig ik al een paar minuten naar het plafond te staren voordat zij ook klaar is om te gaan slapen.

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat.

It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that's not good enough.

Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.

Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.

What does the attack look like?

Calling this threat "existential" is a strong statement, so we should back that up with evidence. The point I want to make here is that this is a lot broader than just one or two isolated examples of trying to win in one market. What we are seeing is the application of the same market-crushing techniques that were used to displace entire industries with the rise of social media and the gig economy, now being deployed across the very open internet infrastructure that made the modern internet possible.

The big tech financiers and venture capitalists who are enabling these attacks are intimately familiar with these platforms, so they know the power and influence that they have — and are deeply experienced at dismantling any systems that have cultural or political power that they can't control. And since they have virtually infinite resources, they're able to carry out these campaigns simultaneously on as many fronts as they need to. The result is an overwhelming wave of threats. It's not a coordinated conspiracy, because it doesn't need to be; they just all have the same end goals in mind.

Some examples:

• Publishers who still share their content openly, either completely free for their audience, as advertising-supported content, or with a limited amount of content available until they ask for some form of payment, are being absolutely hammered by ill-behaved AI bots. These bots are scouring their sites for every available bit of content, scraping all of it up to feed their LLMs, and then making summaries of that content available to users — typically without consent or compensation. The deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
• LLM-based AI platforms that have trained their AI models on this content gathered without consent typically have almost no links back to the original source content, and either bury or omit credits to the original site; as a result, publishers in categories like tech media have seen their traffic crater by over 50%, with some publishers seeing drops of over 90%.
• As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible. We're seeing this already as publishers block archival sites like the Internet Archive, even though we've already seen examples where the Internet Archive was the only accurate record of content that was disappeared by authoritarians in the current administration.
• Open APIs, a building block of how developers build new experiences for users, and for how researchers understand people's behavior online, are rapidly being locked down due to abuse from LLMs, as well as the extremist CEOs not wanting anyone to understand what's happening on their platforms. The clamping down doesn't just affect coders — the people who were best poised to help monitor and translate what's been happening on platforms like Twitter have seen their work under siege, with over 60% of research projects on the platform stalled or abandoned just since Musk shut down their open API access.
• Independent media based on open formats, like podcasts, are also under siege as platforms like Apple's podcasts move to closed infrastructure which means that content creators are now required to work with Apple's approved partners. Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process. The net result will be podcasts moving from being an open format that isn't controlled by either any one company or any manipulative algorithms, to just another closed social platform monetized by surveillance-based advertising.
• Open source software projects, which power the vast majority of the internet's infrastructure, are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions being made by automated AI code agents. These submissions attempt to look like legitimate open source code contributions, and end up overwhelming the largely-underpaid, mostly-volunteer maintainers of open source projects. Dozens of the most popular open source projects have either greatly limited, or even entirely closed their projects to community-based submissions from new contributors as a result. In addition to slowing down and disrupting the open source ecosystem's collaboration model, there's also collateral damage with the destruction of one of the best paths for new coders to establish their credentials, build relationships, and learn to be part of the coding community.
• The most vital open content platforms, like Wikipedia, are under direct attack from bad-faith campaigns. Elon Musk has created Grokipedia to directly undermine Wikipedia with extremist hate content and conspiracist nonsense, by siphoning off traffic, revenues, and contributors from the site. All of this happens while launching spurious attacks on the credibility of the content on Wikipedia, which have led to such radical rhetoric around the site that gatherings of Wikipedia editors now face interruptions from armed attackers. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's human traffic has dropped significantly as AI platforms trained on its content answer users' questions without ever sending them to the site — a pattern that threatens the volunteer contributions and donations that keep it alive.
• The open standards and specifications that underpin the Internet as we know it have always succeeded solely on the basis of there being a shared set of norms and values that make them work. In this way, they're like laws — only as strong as the society that agrees they ought to be enforced. A simple text file called robots.txt functioned for decades to describe the way that tools like search engines ought to behave when accessing content on websites, but now it is effectively dead as Big AI companies unilaterally decided to ignore more than a generation of precedent, and do whatever they want with the entirety of the web, completely without consent. Similarly, long-running efforts like Creative Commons and other community-driven attempts at creating shared declarations or definitions for content use are increasingly just ignored.
• Open source software licenses, which used to be a bedrock of the software community because they provide a consistent way of encoding a set of principles in the form of a legal contract, are now treated as a minor obstacle which can be trivially overcome using LLMs. This means that it's possible to clone code and turn community-driven projects into commercial products without even having to credit the people who invented the original work, let alone compensating them or asking for consent. Many of these efforts are especially egregious because the reason the tools are able to perform this task is because they were trained on this open source code in the first place.

The human cost

The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They're hardly getting rich — that's thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there's no fortune or fame in it.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it's the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who've survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they're trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.

So, we're in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we're all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we're being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.

At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don't think it's any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.

Taking action

Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member. That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words!) These are the people whom I've seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web's defenders.

Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site's members without reciprocating in kind.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can't just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying "enough". And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick's recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be... AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who's read everything I've shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.

But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don't think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called "good AI". I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌦️ - 28-03-2026 01:15 CET

In één oogopslag:
• 7.0°C · Matige motregen 🌦️ | Min 6.6°C / Max 9.9°C | Kans op neerslag 40%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 6.6°C, Max 9.9°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 4.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 40%, 🧭 1019.7 hPa ↗️ +3.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 20.5 km/u (5.7 m/s), richting: ↘ 303°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 7.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 93%, 🧭 1015.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 233°
• 03:00: 7.9°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 82%, 🧭 1015.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 11.2 km/u (3.1 m/s), richting: → 275°
• 04:00: 8.1°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 71%, 🧭 1015.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 13.3 km/u (3.7 m/s), richting: ↘ 310°
• 05:00: 8.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 61%, 🧭 1015.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.4 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: ↘ 312°
• 06:00: 8.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 52%, 🧭 1016.1 hPa ↗️ +0.5 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 15.8 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 322°
• 07:00: 8.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 43%, 🧭 1017.0 hPa ↗️ +0.9 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↘ 331°
• 08:00: 8.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 34%, 🧭 1017.8 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 16.9 km/u (4.7 m/s), richting: ↘ 325°
• 09:00: 8.2°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, Kans op neerslag 25%, 🧭 1018.5 hPa ↗️ +0.7 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↘ 320°
• 10:00: 8.9°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 18%, 🧭 1019.1 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: ↘ 317°
• 11:00: 9.5°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 12%, 🧭 1019.8 hPa ↗️ +0.7 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: ↘ 313°
• 12:00: 9.7°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 7%, 🧭 1019.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.4 km/u (5.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 309°
• 13:00: 9.9°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1020.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.4 km/u (5.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 304°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• zondag 29 maart: Min 4.9°C, Max 9.6°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 2.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 21%, 🧭 1025.6 hPa ↗️ +5.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 28.8 km/u (8.0 m/s), richting: → 253°
• maandag 30 maart: Min 6.1°C, Max 9.1°C (Lichte regen) 🌧️, Neerslag 4.8 mm, Kans op neerslag 69%, 🧭 1016.8 hPa ↘️ -8.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 29.5 km/u (8.2 m/s), richting: ↘ 303°
• dinsdag 31 maart: Min 5.4°C, Max 9.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.4 mm, Kans op neerslag 23%, 🧭 1024.2 hPa ↗️ +7.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 23.4 km/u (6.5 m/s), richting: ↘ 337°
• woensdag 01 april: Min 3.7°C, Max 12.2°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, Kans op neerslag 9%, 🧭 1025.2 hPa ↗️ +1.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 8.9 km/u (2.5 m/s), richting: ↓ 8°
• donderdag 02 april: Min 2.2°C, Max 13.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 7%, 🧭 1018.6 hPa ↘️ -6.6 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 9.6 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ↗ 214°
• vrijdag 03 april: Min 3.8°C, Max 13.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 9%, 🧭 1018.1 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 15.7 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↗ 223°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 01:15): 7.0°C (Matige motregen)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 3.3°C (-3.7°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: ↗ 216°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 37.8 km/h (10.5 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 93%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1015.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 27.6 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 06:26 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 19:08

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 36 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 6.7 μg/m³
• PM10: 7.2 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

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uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, March 1977. From a tray of slides titled "Tony Field's Round Up"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: