Met een nieuwe app kan iedereen het licht van een sterexplosie signaleren. Terwijl kunstmatige intelligentie oprukt, blijkt de menselijke blik nog altijd van onschatbare waarde.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
London cops are being told by their staff association to be "extremely cautious" about carrying work devices off duty, after the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) deployed Palantir's technology to investigate hundreds of its own officers.…
Britain's notorious Ajax armored vehicles are being accepted back from the manufacturer after investigations found no single cause for the symptoms plaguing crews, meaning soldiers will need to grin and bear it.…
PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we recount the adventures of IT explorers who found their own pile of quicksand and then jumped right into it. This week's story involves keeping sensitive information in a very vulnerable place and then not protecting it adequately.…
Er is veel kritiek op de hoge prijzen in met name de Verenigde Staten tijdens het WK voetbal deze zomer. Zo zouden tickets voor het openbaar vervoer op sommige plekken twaalf keer zo duur zijn gemaakt en kost het goedkoopste kaartje voor de finale in New Jersey omgerekend 3.500 euro. Zelfs een parkeerplaats bij het MetLife Stadium kost al snel meer dan tweehonderd dollar. De FIFA zelf verwerpt alle kritiek: “Het is allemaal goed te doen voor de gewone miljonair.”
“Voor de modale miljonair zijn dit hele schappelijke prijzen”, stelt FIFA-voorzitter Gianni Infantino. “Voor Jan Miljonair, de gewone miljonair met de pet, is het allemaal redelijk betaalbaar. En dat doen we expres: we vinden dat álle CEO’s en celebrities naar dit WK moeten kunnen. Het wordt een voetbalfeest voor jong en oud, voor rijk en rijk.”
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Probleembrand Gerard is sinds gister gespot op de Veluwe. Omstanders zagen de nog jonge vlammenzee woest om zich heengrijpen. Het is nog onduidelijk waarom de probleembrand uit het niets is begonnen met ‘onrust stoken’, zoals ooggetuigen het noemen. Ook vandaag was het weer raak.
“We merken dat hij inmiddels niet meer schuw is”, zegt een woordvoerder van Staatsbosbeheer “We gaan proberen om hem af te schrikken met paintballgeweren, anders moeten we zwaarder geschut inzetten. Van het kabinet hebben we inmiddels carte blanche.”
Mensen die in de omgeving van de probleembrand wonen reageren geschrokken, maar weten nog wel hun kalmte te bewaren. “Ik heb in principe geen bezwaar tegen ontbrandingen, maar het moet niet ten koste gaan van de veiligheid”, zegt Epenaar Joke.
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RAYMOND TAM PHOTO has added a photo to the pool:
wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:
宮崎県三股町、椎八重公園 / Shiibae Park, Mimata Town, Miyazaki Prefecture
De nieuwste ProPallie-publiciteitsstunt is weer mislukt. Of geslaagd, het is maar hoe je het bekijkt natuurlijk. In ieder geval wilden de ProPallies van de Global Sumud Flotilla joemanieterrian eed, zo zegt ProPallie-figuur Jesse van Schaik in goed Nederlands, richting Gaza brengen, en dat staat Israël al 100 jaar (oké, iets korter) niet toe. Dus doen de ProPallies dat lekker toch om heel Instagram vol te rammen met filmpjes over hoe spannend het allemaal is om iets te doen wat verboden is. En dan vooral denken daarmee iets goeds te hebben gedaan voor de mensen in Gaza. Telkens weer stuit zo'n zogenoemde Gaza Flotilla, bekend van Metoo-toestanden, dan op de IDF. Zo ook deze keer. Israël zegt daarbij ongeveer 175 ProPallies te hebben opgepakt en 20 boten te hebben gestopt. Onder hen ook vier Nederlanders, zo weet Carel Brendel. Niet alle 'Kaza'-zeggers zijn overigens opgepakt want bijvoorbeeld Jesse van Schaik (van hierboven dus) is nog in afwachting van een Israëlische interventie. Bij ome Carel meer belangwekkends over deze Gazavloot en de opvarenden, die nu even aan het ontspannen zijn (zie na de klik) na hun zware strijd tegen de genocide. Misschien de volgende keer toch eens een nieuwe route proberen, zeg door - we noemen maar wat - de Straat van Hormuz?

Bedankt D66, VVD en CDA. Jullie hebben het geflikt. Deze partijen beloofden grip op migratie, beloofden capabele ministers en geen Marjolein Fabers in een capabel kabinet, eigenlijk stonden ze een soort nieuwe politiek voor, zonder smerige politieke spelletjes en andere onzin maar mét oplossingen voor Nederland. En van al die mooie beloftes kunnen we vandaag een stukje resultaat zien in de cijfers van het CBS: "In het eerste kwartaal van 2026 vroegen bijna 6 duizend mensen voor het eerst asiel aan in Nederland. Dat is 33 procent meer dan in het eerste kwartaal van 2025." Ziehier: HET KAN WÉL. D66, VVD en CDA hebben geleverd! Flink meer asielzoekers geleverd welteverstaan. Onder wie een groot aantal met onbekende nationaliteit, wat waarschijnlijk betekent dat het gaat om psychisch totaal getroebleerde vluchtelingen uit de Palestijnse gebieden. Maar waarvoor dan toch dat bedankje aan het begin van dit topic? Nou, omdat we D66, VVD en CDA toch graag hartelijk wilden bedanken VOOR WERKELIJK HELEMAAL NIETS.
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?
Here’s the TL;DR:
First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.
Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)
With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.
Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.
Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)
People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.
Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.
What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.
In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.
The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)
It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:
Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.
One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!, and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.
In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)
What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.
We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.
The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!
This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.
Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!