The Trump administration has banned newly authorized foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, along with power inverters, citing "unacceptable risks" to the country's national security. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was doing its part "to secure America's critical supply chains." The BBC reports: The FCC has added the items to its Covered List -- a register of goods and services that are deemed a risk to US national security. The ban applies to new foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and power inverters and does not prevent the sale or import of any existing models that had been previously authorized by the FCC.

The FCC cited concerns that the use of foreign-made inverters could allow overseas firms to turn them off, steal data, facilitate remote access and surveillance by "foreign government actors, or be otherwise exploited through a cyberattack." It added that the use of robots made outside the US could allow "malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A corporate fad of "tokenmaxxing" on artificial intelligence technology is hitting its limits as workplaces throwing AI at everything are seeing the costs rise without a similar spike in productivity. What started as tech industry-fueled springtime hype over squeezing as much AI-generated work as possible out of products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude has shifted to a summertime backlash. [...] Just a few months ago, Silicon Valley executives were promoting high token consumption as a signal of high-performing employees. The stereotypical tokenmaxxer was staying up late -- perhaps ignoring their significant other -- while orchestrating an army of 24-hour AI agents performing work on their behalf. [...] The trend boosted revenue for leading AI large language model developers like Anthropic and OpenAI, but it fizzled as it became apparent it wasn't necessarily the best strategy for everyone else.

[...] Bain & Company management consultant Jue Wang said many of the big businesses her firm advises have been taking a closer look at returns on their AI investments. "The token cost for them has been doubling, almost every other month," she said. "Let's say $200 per developer per month. Multiply that by 20,000 developers, which is often what we're dealing with at these companies, and that quickly gets you to a number that is not a line item that any general manager has planned for." Sometimes that just means not using the AI equivalent of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. "Not everything needs a Claude Opus 4.6," she said of one of Anthropic's more capable models suited to software engineering or deep research. "And yet you see so many companies, so many users, default to using Opus for everything, including generating emails." That's led to a search for tools that do AI "model routing" -- in which easier queries get automatically sent to cheaper and more efficient AI systems and more complex tasks go to more powerful models.

[...] At the same time, those who favor racking up as many tokens as possible are having a field day with new open-source models from Chinese startups like Moonshot's Kimi or Zhipu's GLM, which nearly match the capabilities of top U.S. models at a fraction of the price. "There is some validity to the theory that this could push tokenmaxxing a little bit further," said Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at Mozilla. "But if we look at the industry overall, I think it's realizing that tokenmaxxing is a dumb thing." It's similar, Krikorian said, to how software companies once considered how many lines of code a programmer wrote to be a good metric of productivity. That later fell out of favor. "I think tokenmaxxing is moving through the exact same pattern," he said. "I think this is going to be an interesting blip that we're all going to look back to laugh at in a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has replaced its iPhone Upgrade Program with Apple Upgrade, a Klarna-backed U.S. leasing service covering most iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. MacRumors reports: Apple Upgrade has lower base prices than the iPhone Upgrade Program, with iPhones available starting at $17.99 per month and the Apple Watch available starting at $11.99 per month. Macs can be leased starting at $24.99 per month, and iPads start at $11.99 per month. AppleCare+ is optional and not included in the lease price, with customers also able to opt for AppleCare One. There are 12-month and 24-month leasing options for the iPhone and Apple Watch, along with 24-month and 36-month leasing options for the Mac and iPad. Lease cost varies based on device, and is lower with a device trade-in that's applied on a monthly basis. [...]

When leasing an iPhone, customers are required to choose a plan from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile, and prepaid plans are not eligible. iPhones need to be leased with a carrier plan, but the iPhones are unlocked so customers can switch carriers if desired. MVNOs like Mint Mobile or Visible are not supported. At the end of the leasing period, customers can choose to return the device and exit the program, pay off the remaining amount owed on the device with a one-time payment and keep it, or return it and upgrade to a new device with a new lease.

The payoff amount is the difference between what was paid during the leasing period and the retail price of the device, minus any remaining trade-in credits. Klarna is not charging a fee for the leasing program, so an iPhone that's $1,099 can be leased and then purchased for $1,099 with no extra cost beyond taxes. As with trade-ins, Apple will send a pre-labeled and prepaid shipping box for device returns or upgrades. If you don't opt to pay the purchase fee at the end of the leasing program, you will not own the device and must return it. Last week, after Bloomberg reported on Apple's upcoming leasing program, 9to5Mac uncovered code in the iOS 27 beta suggesting the company was developing a system that could restrict leased iPhones when customers fall behind on payments. Apple has now told The Verge that the new "Restricted Mode" will not be activated in response to a missed lease payment. What the new system is actually meant for remains unclear.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has yet to produce the expected surge in real-world attacks: VulnCheck found that only 14 of 1,061 attributed discoveries, or 1.3 percent, had been exploited, which is "almost identical to the rate across all vulnerabilities in VulnCheck's dataset," reports The Register. "That's a far cry from the narrative that frontier AI is dramatically tilting the balance in attackers' favor by churning out instantly weaponizable bugs." The findings suggest AI is currently better at increasing the volume of bugs found than making them easier to weaponize. From the report: The report takes particular aim at Anthropic's much-publicized Project Glasswing, unveiled in April with warnings that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery could allow attackers to hijack systems, disrupt operations, or steal data. Claude Mythos may have identified 23,019 vulnerability candidates, but there's remarkably little public evidence showing what became of most of them. VulnCheck notes that only 126 have been published as CVEs, that just one has been confirmed exploited in the wild, and that Anthropic's public disclosure record has seen little movement since Project Glasswing launched.

But that doesn't mean AI-assisted vulnerability research has failed, according to Patrick Garrity, security researcher at VulnCheck. "AI-assisted vulnerability discovery clearly has value for both attackers and defenders," Garrity wrote. "The data does not suggest that AI-discovered vulnerabilities are inherently more likely to be exploited than those found through traditional methods." Instead, he argues, AI is simply helping researchers discover more flaws, giving defenders an opportunity to patch them before criminals get there.

Garrity stopped well short of declaring the threat overblown forever, but he did suggest some of the rhetoric has outpaced reality. "The data so far, including Anthropic's own stalled disclosure ledger, suggests that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and frontier capabilities have been overhyped relative to the evidence available today," he wrote. "That doesn't mean the risk is imaginary. It means the impact has been real but modest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Dit is een verwijzing naar de Halo game-reeks, inclusief muziek)

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Nou, die duurde langer dan iedereen gedacht en korter dan iedereen gehoopt had. Dus daar gaan we maar weer! CENTCOM schreef gistermiddag dat Iran ineens een "gepoogde verrassingsaanval" met ballistische raketten uitvoerde op Amerikaanse basissen in het Midden-Oosten, later bleek dat om Jordanië te gaan. Vervolgens zag Amerika zich genoodzaakt terug te slaan, al koos het daarbij niet voor Iran zelf, maar voor een preventieve aanval tegen door Iran gesteunde milities in Irak. CENTCOM schreef vijf uur geleden: 

"Op 28 juli voerden het Amerikaanse Central Command en de Saoedische strijdkrachten precisieaanvallen uit in Irak tegen aan Iran gelieerde terroristen; zij handelden in opdracht van de Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde (IRGC) en hadden als doel Amerikaanse troepen en Saoedische energie-infrastructuur aan te vallen. Amerikaanse en Saoedische gevechtsvliegtuigen bestookten diverse logistieke locaties en wapenopslagplaatsen van terroristen in Oost-Irak. Dit was een krachtige reactie op meer dan dertig droneaanvallen die in de afgelopen 72 uur in opdracht van de IRGC waren uitgevoerd. De ongeoorloofde aanvallen op Amerikaanse troepen waren niet succesvol. Tussen februari en april 2026 vonden er meer dan 600 aanvalspogingen plaats door aan Iran gelieerde terroristische milities in Irak, gericht op Amerikaanse burgers en faciliteiten. De IRGC en de terroristische groeperingen die als hun gevolmachtigden optreden, moeten een einde maken aan deze aanvallen om verdere militaire reacties van de VS te voorkomen."

In ander nieuws was Netanyahu gisteren bij Trump op bezoek in het Witte Huis, en in tegenstelling tot voorgaande keren was er geen openbaar persmoment met draaiende camera's, we moeten het doen met een paar foto's en Trumps bijsluiter: "Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, along with myself and Representatives. Had a very good meeting! Obviously, many important subjects were discussed." Ook werd Netanyahu niet bij de voordeur ontvangen, maar kwam opnieuw zonder draaiende camera's binnen via de zijdeur. De lezing van dit lage profiel (zo zeg je dat in het Nederlands) lijkt te zijn dat zowel de VS als Israël van de perceptie af willen dat Israël Amerika steeds opnieuw de oorlog intrekt.

Onderstaand bijzonder beeld van Netanyahu en Zelensky op de begrafenis van Lindsey Graham, zeker gezien Oekraïne eergisteren een Iraans commercieel schip in de Kaspische Zee aanviel, en Iran vervolgens met vergelding tegen Oekraïne begon te overwegen. Afijn, wij maar weer eens live!

Fascinerende mimiek bij de twee Hebreeuwse krijgsheren op Lindsey Grahams begrafenis

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Bibi met Hegseth en Rubio

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Opmerkelijk: alleen foto's, geen persmoment met draaiende camera's

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Purple-backed Fairywren
Scientific Name: Malurus assimilis
It was long considered a subspecies of the variegated fairywren until its genetic distinctness led to it once again becoming a separate species in 2018.
Description: The purple-backed fairywren is on average 14.5 cm (5.5 in) long.[citation needed] Like other fairywrens, it is notable for its marked sexual dimorphism, males adopting a highly visible breeding plumage of brilliant iridescent blue and chestnut contrasting with black and grey-brown. The brightly coloured crown and ear tufts are prominently featured in breeding displays. The male in breeding plumage has striking bright blue ear coverts and blue-purple crown and forehead, a black throat and nape, a blue-purple upper back, chestnut shoulders and a bluish-grey tail. The wings are drab brown and the belly white. Within subspecies assimilis, the plumage of both sexes is becomes paler from east to west across its range, with those of northwestern Australia paler still. Non-breeding males, females and juveniles of subspecies assimilis are predominantly grey-brown in colour, while those of subspecies rogersi and dulcis are mainly blue-grey. Males of all subspecies have a black bill and lores (eye-ring and bare skin between eyes and bill), while females of subspecies assimilis and rogersi have a red-brown bill and bright rufous lores, and those of subspecies dulcis have white lores. Immature males will develop black bills by six months of age, and moult into breeding plumage the first breeding season after hatching, though this may be incomplete with residual brownish plumage and may take another year or two to perfect.[23] Both sexes moult in autumn after breeding, with males assuming an eclipse non-breeding plumage. They will moult again into nuptial plumage in winter or spring. The blue coloured plumage, particularly the ear-coverts, of the breeding males is highly iridescent due to the flattened and twisted surface of the barbules. The blue plumage also reflects ultraviolet light strongly, and so may be even more prominent to other fairywrens, whose colour vision extends into that part of the spectrum.
Distribution and habitat: The purple-backed fairywren is widely distributed over much of the Australian continent. It is replaced in southwestern Western Australia by the red-winged and blue-breasted fairywrens, and by the lovely fairywren north of a line between Normanton and Townsville in north Queensland. Some early evidence suggested subspecies assimilis may be nomadic, but later more detailed fieldwork indicated it was generally sedentary, with pairs of purple-backed fairywrens maintaining territories year-round. There is little information on the other subspecies. It is found in scrubland with plenty of vegetation providing dense cover. It prefers rocky outcrops and patches of Acacia, Eremophila or lignum in inland and northern Australia. Fieldwork in the Northern Territory showed that the species preferred open woodland dominated by thickets of lancewood (Acacia shirleyi) and bullwaddy (Macropteranthes kekwickii) than eucalyptus.[29] Chenopod scrubland with plants such as saltbush, bluebush, black rolypoly (Sclerolaena muricata), nitre goosefoot (Chenopodium nitrariaceum), grass tussocks, and overstory plants such as black box (Eucalyptus largiflorens) and native cypress (Callitris). Clearing of native vegetation for agriculture in the Western Australian wheatbelt and Murray-Mallee region of Victoria had a negative impact on the species, as does the consumption of saltbush by cattle.
Breeding: Breeding can occur at any time in inland Australia, with birds taking the opportunity to nest after heavy rains, although only one brood is usually raised each year. The nest is a round or domed structure made of loosely woven grasses, twigs, bark and spider webs, with an entrance in one side, and is often larger than those of other fairywrens. Nest measured at Shark Bay ranged from 9 to 11 cm tall and 5 to 9 cm wide.


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Western Australia

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Square-tailed Kite
Scientific Name: Lophoictinia isura
Although it usually occurs singly, the Square-tailed Kite is sometimes seen soaring in pairs during the breeding season, and family groups of adults and one or two dependent young may be seen during post-fledging period. The Square-tailed Kite usually hunts by flying low over the treetops, occasionally plunging down through the foliage to snatch a bird or insect from among the leaves or twigs. The species often eats the nestlings of birds, and sometimes it will remove the entire nest to get at the young birds, and at other times may remove the tiny birds, one clutched tightly by the talons of each foot. They also catch adult birds by surprising them in the canopy of the forest.
Description: Often solitary, but can be seen in pairs when nesting. Squared-tailed Kites have a long, square tail with very long, upswept paddle-shaped wings and a large cream crescent at the base of their wing tips.
Similar Species: Immature Black Kite, Black-breasted Buzzard, and Red Goshawk
Distribution: Endemic to mainland Australia.
Habitat: The species mainly inhabits open eucalypt forests and woodlands, often where there is a broken canopy, but it also ranges into nearby open habitats. In southern Australia, Square-tailed Kites mainly inhabit open eucalypt forests and woodlands, often dominated by stringybarks, peppermints or box–ironbark eucalypts, as well as Woollybutt, Spotted Gum, Manna Gum, Messmate, River Red Gums, as well as other trees such as Angophora, cypress-pines and casuarinas. It also occurs along the edges of dense forest and along in road verges with remnant or planted trees, and in clearings within forest or in areas of regrowth, up to 4 years after the area has been logged. Other habitats which occasionally support Square-tailed Kites include mallee, heathland (mallee or coastal) and other low shrublands including saltbush plains, and also grasslands or open or cultivated farmland near remnant woodland.
Feeding: Searching for prey from the air, where they are highly agile at low levels, they mainly hunt in eucalypt open forest or woodland, and less often in low shrublands, heath, grassland or crops, and the margins between open and timbered country (forest–heath; woodland–heath; forest–open field; mallee–open paddocks; woodland edges; riparian timber; belts of trees in urban or semi-urban areas; and clearings in forests) are especially favoured. They specialise in hunting among trees, twisting between and below tree-tops, and they take most prey from the outer foliage of the canopy, but do not enter the canopy.
Breeding: Square-tailed Kites nest on horizontal branches in mature living trees, especially eucalypts, often near water, and they need extensive areas of forest or woodland surrounding or nearby.
Calls: Yelping, yeep, yeep, yeep. Also squealing ee ee ee ee
Minimum Size: 50cm
Maximum Size: 55cm
Average size: 53cm
Average weight: 568g
Breeding season: Aug - Dec
Incubation: 37 days
Nestling Period: 63 days
(Sources: www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Lophoictinia-isura and www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/square-tailed-kite)

© Chris Burns 2026
__________________________________________

All rights reserved.

This image may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording without my written consent.

Bij iedere juridische maatregel is wel een technische tegenmaatregel te bedenken. Geoblocking is een bekende: gewoon een vpn installeren en hopsakee, je kunt er alsnog bij. Leuk en aardig, maar betekent niet dat die maatregel ongeldig of onhoudbaar is. De wet wil “goed genoeg” afdekken.

Ik roep dit al jaren, en voel me gesterkt door het recente arrest in de Anne Frank-zaak van het Hof van Justitie. Achterliggend is een wat ingewikkeld auteursrechtengeschil:

Na het overlijden van Otto Frank [die het dagboek bewerkte en uitgaf] is het Anne Frank Fonds houder van de auteursrechten op de werken van Anne Frank geworden. Zoals blijkt uit een definitieve uitspraak van de rechtbank Amsterdam (Nederland) van 23 december 2015 is een deel van deze werken in Nederland tot 2037 auteursrechtelijk beschermd krachtens een overgangsregeling van de Auteurswet. In andere landen, waaronder het Koninkrijk België, behoren deze werken tot het publieke domein.

Op de website www.annefrankmanuscripten.org wordt een wetenschappelijke editie van de manuscripten van Anne Frank gepubliceerd. Daarbij wordt middels geoblocking Nederlandse IP-adressen geweerd.

Vroeger stond er ook nog een knop bij „JA, ik raadpleeg de website vanuit een van de bovenstaande publiek domein-landen”, waarmee je dan de blocking kon opheffen onder dreiging van auteursrechtelijke sancties wegens omzeilen van beveiligingsmaatregelen (artikel 27a Auteurswet). Die knop zie ik nu niet meer.

Het Anne Frank Fonds stapte in 2021 naar de rechter omdat dit ondanks de maatregelen inbreuk op auteursrecht zou zijn. Daarbij woog mee dat de geoblocking te omzeilen zou zijn met een virtueel particulier netwerk, wat dan triviaal genoeg op te zetten zou zijn. Dat leidde tot vragen aan het Hof van Justitie, waar nu antwoord op is.

Het Hof is al een tijdje bezig met jurisprudentie over wat “het publiek” is waar je bij een publicatie je op richt. Als je je met effectieve technische maatregelen beperkt tot een bepaald publiek, dan richt je je niet op een ander publiek. Dat kan uitmaken voor je licentie, zoals wanneer je alleen schoolkinderen toegang wil geven. Maar omgekeerd geldt het ook: wie de publicatie met maatregelen beperkt tot “de wereld minus Nederland”, richt zich niet op Nederland.

Dan dus de hamvraag: is het “effectief” om een geoblokkade op basis van IP-adres te doen? We weten immers dat “gebruik gewoon een vpn” een voor de hand liggende reactie is. Hier, een mond vol van het Hof:

Het Hof heeft in dit verband gepreciseerd dat de doeltreffendheid van een technische voorziening niet absoluut hoeft te zijn, maar met inachtneming van het evenredigheidsbeginsel moet worden beoordeeld in het licht van de doelstelling om handelingen te voorkomen of onmogelijk te maken die niet zijn toegestaan door de auteursrechthebbende, waarbij dus met name dient te worden nagegaan of de betrokken voorziening geschikt is om dat doel te verwezenlijken en niet verder gaat dan daartoe noodzakelijk is en, zoals in punt 26 hierboven is aangegeven, een rechtvaardig evenwicht dient te worden gezocht tussen de bescherming van intellectuele-eigendomsrechten en die van andere grondrechten, zoals de vrijheid van meningsuiting en van informatie.

In gewone taal zegt het Hof: een maatregel hoeft niet perfect te werken, maar moet in de regel het effect hebben. Tegelijk moet de maatregel vals positieven beperken (zoals Belgen die toevallig een Nederlands IP-adres lijken te hebben). Dat er tegenmaatregelen zijn, is als abstracte tegenwerping géén argument.

Wel moet de maatregel “state-of-the-art” zijn, wat ik maar opvat als “je moet wel je best gedaan hebben” want hoe je dat meet, weet eigenlijk niemand. (De arme nationale rechter moet maar een deskundige benoemen.)

Dat er ook andere maatregelen zijn, zoals alleen via terminals in een bibliotheek of na identiteitsverificatie toelaten, is niet relevant. Je moet de maatregel zelf beoordelen op haar effectiviteit.

Arnoud

 

Het bericht Juridisch is geoblocking prima, ook als mensen er met een VPN omheen kunnen verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

South Korean memory-maker SK Hynix has revealed that it’s struck “around ten” long-term supply deals with key customers, many of them AI players, and hopes the deals smooth out volatile memory prices. The company revealed the deals today, along with Q2 results that saw quarterly revenue reach ₩79.3 trillion ($54.5 billion), a 257 percent year-over-year increase. Operating profit grew by an even larger number: 557 percent year-over-year to ₩60.5 trillion ($41.6 billion). The memory-maker even achieved the unusual feat of delivering more net income than revenue, thanks to asset sales. Underlying all that growth was an average 30 percent increase in the average price customers paid for DRAM, a 50 percent rise in the prices paid for NAND memory, along with increased shipments. But the company predicted slow growth in Q3, with NAND shipments rising by a low single-digit percentage and about ten percent more DRAM to leave SK Hynix’s factories. Some of that memory will be HBM4, which execs said will ship in increased volume and mean average selling prices rise higher still, as will earnings. Execs pointed to the company’s colossal expenditure on additional manufacturing capacity but said they see no risk of creating oversupply because the AI industry has a voracious appetite for memory and will do for the foreseeable future. Indeed, company president Song Hyeon-jong said SK Hynix’s relationship with customers “is evolving beyond transactional relations into more strategic long-term partnerships” and said that behavior “serves as the evidence of the sustained demand coming from the AI ecosystem.” SK Hynix’s big customers are therefore typically doing deals that last up to five years and structuring those arrangements to keep prices steady. “The objective is to reduce uncertainty arising from short-term market volatility while enhancing long-term business stability for both our customers and SK Hynix,” Song said. “At the same time, it is equally important to secure effective purchase commitment, given the impact that demand volatility can have on the memory cycle,” he added. “In addition to long-term volume commitments, the agreements include mechanisms such as deposits that can strengthen contract implementation and demand visibility.” All of which sounds rather like SK Hynix’s big customers are trying to keep memory prices as low as possible, by helping the Korean company to manage its cashflow so it can keep cranking out more chips. Head of investor relations Park Seong-hwan argued that demand for memory and storage will remain strong for years to come, even if major AI companies find themselves with more datacenter capacity than they need. Park said hyperscalers leasing their datacenters is a sign of increased utilization rates for existing AI infrastructure. He also brushed aside adoption of more efficient models as a trend that could be bad for memory sales, suggesting better models spur demand for AI services and therefore also for more infrastructure. “This view is also supported by the medium-to long-term demand outlook we have discussed with our key customers,” Park said. The company also argued that agentic AI will spur demand for more memory, including in servers. “We are witnessing a structural shift in demand where both AI memory and conventional memory are growing together,” the company wrote in its earnings release. Investors appear not to have been impressed by those arguments, or SK Hynix’s profits, as the company’s share price has dropped around five percent at the time of writing. ®

The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations. The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The national security document observes “Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland” and notes that modern bots are now constantly connected to networks “which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.” One example of those vulnerabilities mentioned in the document is the UniPwn flaws that made it possible for attackers to take over humanoid robots made by Chinese company Unitree. “If the United States continues to rely on foreign sources of advanced robotic devices and critical components, it will subject the parts of the U.S. economy and national security enterprise that are reliant on these robots to the whims of foreign entities that could disrupt or degrade the supply chains at a time of their choosing,” the document states. To respond to those threats, the FCC decided the foreign-made advanced robotic devices belong on its Covered List of products for which imports are banned because they pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and its residents. The regulator offered a single exception: if the Department of War vouches for a device, it can have it. Foreign-owned companies that make their bots in America are also exempt, an important exemption because one of the leading robot-makers is Boston Dynamics – a company backed by the USA’s DARPA that is now majority-owned by South Korea’s Hyundai, but continues to manufacture its machines stateside. The decision does, however, apply to all future foreign-made devices. Vendors of clankers already approved for sale in the USA can continue to import them, and users are also free to use any bots they already own. But the intent of the documents is clear: from now on, only robots made in America are welcome in America. One entity that stands to benefit from this decision is Tesla, which Elon Musk claims will one day produce one million humanoid robots a year. In true Muskian style he has also said Tesla will go into “high production” of the bots in 2026, but there’s no evidence of that happening although the occasional trillionaire did recently show off the production line for Tesla’s “Optimus” bot. ®

Het was al duidelijk dat er doden waren gevallen bij de beving, maar nog niet bekend hoeveel. Het dodental zal naar alle waarschijnlijk nog verder oplopen.

Deze zomer is Amsterdam het middelpunt van de internationale queergemeenschap. Het is World Pride, twee weken vol feest én protest.

Met enorme natuurbranden in Frankrijk, Spanje en Portugal staat Europa voor een nieuwe uitdaging: hoe temmen we zo snel mogelijk al dat vuur?

We wandelen langs het Planetenpad bij het Herdenkingscentrum Westerbork en verdiepen ons in de op schaal geplaatste informatieborden over de planeten in ons zonnestelsel.

Een Precies Vier bestaat uit 16 woorden, begrippen of namen, die moeten worden verdeeld in precies vier groepen van vier. Er is telkens maar één oplossing mogelijk. Welke woorden vormen een connectie?

Een kruiswoordpuzzel, maar dan heel klein (en snel).

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.

The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.

Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT-5.5, and the open-weights GLM-5.2) break 65%­86% of Tier 1 schemes, 6­12 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 24­61 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI’s published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known.

We release CryptanalysisBench as a tool to help track if (or when) AI cryptanalysis becomes a serious factor and as a scaffold for stress-testing candidate schemes before deployment. The attacks that the benchmark already surfaces are an early snapshot of a fast-moving frontier that may soon match, and in places exceed, the published state of the art.

Anthropic used the benchmark to test Mythos Preview, and found new vulnerabilities in Hawk and reduced-round AES.

Still early results, but this is definitely something to watch.

SlashDot thread.

A decade ago, when I was still speaking at conferences and heavily marketing myself, I’d often think of personal branding ideas. We’ve seen the trends. The business cards. The t-shirts. The stickers. The buttons. The socks! Can’t forget the socks. My logo is branded across not only my sites but my computers and my slide decks, too.

I also liked using colour to reinforce my brand. I’ve continued that tradition with green threading throughout the latest redesign. I even considering wearing green for all my conference talks. Thankfully, that ended up being a short-lived idea.

At one point in my career, I was getting interviewed for a number of podcasts and considered starting up my own podcast. One of the ideas that came out of preparing to start my own podcast was how to brand via audio. I liked the idea of doing chimes like the NBC chimes so that’s what I did:

It’s five dings in the pattern of how I spell out my last name: Ess Enn oh-OH Kay.

Had I implemented this, I had considered using it to intro my conference talks. I likely would’ve integrated it into the site somehow as well. Maybe clicking on the logo rings the chime as the letters of my name pop in sequence.

For now, I’ll simply document this little artifact of time.

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