The Associated Press reports:

Italy announced an €805 million ($887 million) fine against Meta on Saturday for using photos and videos from Android users' galleries on Facebook without specific consent or adequate disclosure...
Investigators found that the feature was enabled by default and that Facebook requested gallery access through a single permission covering multiple app functions with different purposes. The authority gave Meta 60 days to disable the feature and seek separate consent for its use.

Italy has about 20 million Android users, notes the BBC, and this fine "is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant."


The charge is related to a feature which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts... According to the Italian regulator, a preceding [authorization] notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery. The regulator said it took into account "the high number of people affected" and the fact it is "still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system". It also cited "Meta's lack of co-operation".

"A Meta spokesperson told the BBC that it planned to appeal..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• All the latest news from around the footballing world

• Get in touch: contact our matchday live writers on email

Away from the Nations League, there was a huge game between Chelsea and Manchester City in the Women’s Super League yesterday. A belter from Sandy Baltimore saw Sonia Bompastor’s side leapfrog last year’s WSL champions in the table. Read Suzanne Wrack’s match report here.

Belgium v Italy

France v Turkey

Croatia v Czechia

Spain v England

Belarus v Albania

Finland v San Marino

Cyprus v Montenegro

Latvia v Armenia

Continue reading...

Delayed deliveries and inspection hold-ups among issues facing hauliers navigating post-Brexit border processes

Three small boxes of spinach and ricotta cannelloni destined for a supermarket in Gibraltar languish on an EU inspector’s bench at the Eurotunnel terminal in Calais.

They have been removed from a truck laden with perishables for British food lovers on the Rock – Morrisons steak and ale pie, family-size blocks of Morrisons cheddar cheese, ‘M’ Best coleslaw from Avondale foods in Craigavon in Northern Ireland and long-life milk.

Continue reading...

Strongest El Niño in centuries adds urgency to UN climate talks as vulnerable countries face ‘compounding’ crises

If the galloping pace of the climate crisis isn’t enough to spur countries to act at UN climate talks under way in Turkey, there is another major threat heightening its havoc: the strongest El Niño event in at least 1,000 years.

The “jaw-dropping” El Niño, a naturally recurring phenomenon where the eastern Pacific heats up every few years with temporary but global implications, has provided added urgency to wrangling at the Cop31 summit over climate funding for vulnerable countries that are having to scramble to respond.

Continue reading...

The former England centre-back answers your questions on Diego Maradona, Bobby Robson and on staying in strange places

“Have you made up all these on your own?” asks Terry Butcher, sitting in a London office in the week he is presented with his England legacy cap. It turns out dozens of Guardian readers want to pick the brains of a much-loved centre-back who was feted en route to a World Cup semi-final and tormented four years previously by the mercurial genius of Diego Maradona.

Did Maradona ever admit to the “Hand of God”? Butcher found himself in the post-match doping-control room alongside his nemesis at the Azteca in 1986. “I tapped my head, then my hand, and then he tapped his head,” Butcher says. “He didn’t admit to it because, if he had, I’d have been right across that room.”

Continue reading...

In the 90s, I studied under the notorious racist lecturer Frank Ellis. At a time when I should have felt liberated to explore, it chipped away at my self-esteem

In 2006, Dr Frank Ellis, who taught Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, was suspended from his post as lecturer after he told a student newspaper that he supported the theory that Black people were less intelligent than white people. In the pages of the Guardian at the time, he was described as a “lecturer who insisted that black people and women were genetically inferior”. This was six years after his views first received national coverage.

When I saw Ellis’s views make it to the national press, I felt angry. I had known Ellis was a racist because when I was a student of Russian studies between 1996 and 2000, he taught many of my classes and I had to endure hearing his views on a regular basis. He would regularly tell us that nothing good had ever come out of Africa, and he would share how he wrote for white supremacist publications and attended conferences in the US alongside members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Ebony Riddell Bamber is the programme director of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement programme

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...

Winning his first two grand slams and leading the rankings should be cause for celebration, but the German benefited from a vacuum at the top

Alexander Zverev had plenty of thoughts in the miserable aftermath of his loss at the Paris Masters last week, a 7-6 (5), 6-2 second-round defeat by Lorenzo Musetti marking him as the first ATP No 1 to lose his first match as the top-ranked player in straight sets.

Rather than feeling any pressure surrounding his new status in the buildup to the final Masters 1000 tournament of the year, Zverev had simply been annoyed. “Achieving the world No 1 status is something every player dreams of, but I feel like I’m the only world No 1 in tennis history that has to explain why it’s OK for me to be world No 1. Which I find quite difficult, because I think I deserve to be where I am, even though I lost today.”

Continue reading...

Dutch designer sets up an app to help fellow enthusiasts find the great trees of the world

While most people spend their holidays sightseeing or lazing by a pool, Hidde Burgmans would rather seek out special trees.

While not an expert in the subject, the 37-year-old from Baarn in the Netherlands has developed what he cheerfully admits is something of an obsession. He even managed to propose to his girlfriend, Nadia Roeleveld, under a particularly special cedar in Japan: “My fiancee always laughs, because she’s like, ‘OK, we have to make a detour again because Hidde found another big tree’.”

Continue reading...

Vier wedstrijden, vier overwinningen. Feyenoord Onder 19 maakt indruk in de Youth League, maar ook individueel gaat het hard met de Rotterdamse talenten. Levi Haps mocht al meetrainen met het eerste elftal, terwijl Ibrahim Faik onlangs voor Oranje koos. De twee vertellen over hun ontwikkeling, hun dromen en het vertrouwen binnen de ploeg.

In de Van Heusdenstraat in Rotterdam-Delfshaven is in de vroege zondagmorgen een ontploffing geweest. Dat gebeurde bij de toegangsdeur van een appartementencomplex. Niemand raakte gewond.

Business computing turns 75 this month, and Cambridge's Centre for Computing History is throwing a party for LEO, the machine that helped start it all. The LEO@75 event takes place on Saturday, November 28, from 10am to 5pm, with film screenings, historical displays, and hands-on activities for children. The Register has written about the Centre for Computing History a few times. It's an interactive computer museum just off Coldhams Lane in Cambridge, and back in 2018 it won National Lottery funding to help it "preserve, archive and digitise a range of LEO Computers artefacts, documents and personal memories." Admission supports the museum charity, with student and concession tickets at £10 and family tickets starting at £15. As well as stuff for the grown-ups, including a film screening, it will include events for smaller children (5-7) and a Python coding event for older (12-16) kids. Regular readers might recall our story about the Lyons Electronic Office back in 2021, celebrating its 70th anniversary. The Reg also published an obituary for Mary Coombs, the first female commercial programmer the following year. Coombs started programming LEO in 1952. Both stories offer more on the machine and the people behind it. LEO was an early computer, but from three-quarters of a century away, it's easy to miss just how early. Its design was based on Cambridge University's EDSAC, developed by a team led by the late, great Sir Maurice Wilkes. The Reg mentioned EDSAC in our obituary for Wilkes, and went into more detail for his centenary in 2013. It also crops up in our Geek's Guide to Cambridge. The design of EDSAC was directly inspired by John von Neumann's famous, and incomplete, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" – which The Reg talked about in 2011. The draft report was circulated in 1945, based on the proposal for EDVAC, four years before the hardware was delivered. That was also the year John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert completed its predecessor, ENIAC. In its original form, ENIAC was programmed by setting switches and reconnecting cables; EDVAC, by contrast, was designed to store its instructions in memory. The report set out what's now called the "von Neumann architecture." Wilkes and Douglas Hartree drew on those ideas in developing EDSAC, LEO's immediate forerunner and one of the world's earliest practical stored-program computers. The first working electronic stored-program machine was the Manchester "Baby," the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, which ran its first program in 1948. EDSAC ran its first program in May 1949 – a few months before the delivery of BINAC, Eckert and Mauchly's first stored-program machine. LEO ran its first commercial application in 1951. That was also the year the US Census Bureau took delivery of Eckert and Mauchly's UNIVAC I. ®

mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Investigating Donald Trump's Financial Scandals (Coffeezilla, YouTube, 51m)

PARIJS (ANP) - Frankrijk verbiedt per direct tot eind november de verkoop en het gebruik van meerdere soorten (zwaar) vuurwerk in het land, specifiek vuurwerkmortieren. Dat schrijven Franse media als Le Parisien na verschijning van de maatregel in de staatscourant. Bij de vele demonstraties die recentelijk werden gehouden in het land werd vaak vuurwerk gegooid, onder meer naar ordediensten. De maatregel geldt tot in ieder geval 27 november. Een uitzondering geldt voor wie het vuurwerk professioneel gebruikt.

Vuurwerkmortieren "worden niet langer gebruikt om te vieren, ze worden gebruikt om schade mee te berokkenen", citeert Le Parisien de Franse overheid. "Het recht op demonstratie blijft gegarandeerd, maar het recht om anderen zeer te doen bestaat niet." De mortieren werden onder meer bij de aanhoudende onderwijsprotesten gegooid, soms op hoofdhoogte en gericht tegen onderwijspersoneel, gendarmes en scholieren zelf.

Bij de recente protesten in Frankrijk werden al duizenden mensen opgepakt, van wie sommigen voor ernstige delicten. In meerdere steden werd geplunderd, brand gesticht en gevochten met ordediensten. Onder meer het stadhuis van Limoges ging grotendeels in vlammen op, evenals een toerismekantoor in Lyon. Naast de bestaande onvrede over de staat van het onderwijs en boosheid tegen de regering, is er ook veel discussie in Frankrijk over het geweld dat ordediensten gebruiken om de protesten in te dammen.

Zo liepen verschillende scholieren ernstige verwondingen op door politiegranaten. De Franse ordediensten gebruiken naast traangasgranaten ook projectielen die exploderen of zaken als rubberen balletjes bevatten. Het gebruik daarvan is zeer omstreden. Zo verloor een scholier een hand, en ook iemand een oog. Ook in het verleden leidde het gebruik van vergelijkbare munitie tot ophef, zoals tijdens de gelehesjesprotesten enkele jaren terug.

Veronica Williams PHOTOGRAPHER has added a photo to the pool:

© Veronica Williams PHOTOGRAPHER

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool: