ON CALL The 2026 FIFA World Cup continues and at the time of writing, The Register's home nation – England – remains in with a chance to bring home the trophy! We therefore devote this week's edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support, to the beautiful game. We're able to do so thanks to a reader we'll Regomize as "George" who once pulled off a great save when, decades ago, he worked as one half of the two-person tech team at one of Europe's most famous football clubs. "The IT manager wouldn't work weekends," George told On Call, and that meant he had to attend most home games to provide tech support. "Mostly I'd be paid overtime to sit around in the police control room for a few hours, eat free pies, and pretend I was vital to operations," George wrote. "Occasionally, a minor issue would require my input, but typically it was a quiet day spent watching the match in comfort." The club George worked for enjoys an ancient and enormously fierce rivalry with another. When the two teams meet, it's a major event, authorities insist on extra security, and police brace for trouble across an entire city. That caution extends into the club's stadium. "The club would hand over overall responsibility for stadium safety to a suitable deputy chief constable for the duration of the game," George explained. "That officer had the ultimate say on whether the match would go ahead in the case of any safety issues." On the day in question, power to the police control room suddenly went out – just as the ground started filling for the big match. "This was a major issue. We had no radio to coordinate hundreds of stewards and police officers, no CCTV monitoring stations, and most critically, no exit gate control – an essential requirement for acceptable match day safety," George told On Call. Club officials therefore dispatched an electrician to sort things out, but the sparky soon returned with bad news: a recent upgrade had burned out, and a fix would take days. On most match days, the outage would mean immediate cancellation of the match - and a big fine for the club for failing to stage the game. But with a fevered crowd flooding in from the streets near the stadium, calling off the match had the potential to see frothing fans turn ugly. The officer in charge and the stadium operations director therefore entered had a terse discussion, during which they asked the electrician if a portable generator might address the problem – but that wasn't possible. At this point, George asked the officer in charge what minimum setup would make it safe to let the game proceed. "The response was that if we could centrally open the exit gates at the end of the match, or in the event of an evacuation, and get the CCTV and radio working, the match could go ahead." George then revealed that he had just that week installed a new 4U uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in the football club's server room and had been charging it ever since. (In case any tech-averse football fans stumble upon this story, a UPS is a substantial battery used to keep critical computers running when power drops out. They store plenty of energy, but nobody assumes they'll last for hours.) George felt the UPS unit might do the job. "After some quick napkin math, I suggested it might have enough juice to power those critical systems for long enough to allow the match to proceed," he wrote. The police officer and operations director agreed to let George try to make it work. "I rounded up a few lingering stewards, the electrician, and two uniformed coppers, and we set off to the server room. We retrieved the UPS and humped the massive bloody thing halfway round the stadium, through the crowds, and up the tight stairwell into the control room." George then jury-rigged extension cables to the systems that needed power and turned them on. "I felt like Tom Hanks trying to get that guidance computer online in Apollo 13," he told On Call. "Amazingly, everything actually came up and stayed up, the UPS's extremely vague five LED capacity lights held solid at full green and the order was given for the match to proceed," George said. He spent the entirety of the match staring at those LEDs, and as the match progressed, he started praying it would not go too deep into stoppage time. "The final whistle blew, we opened the gates, and the UPS lasted another 10 minutes before finally conking out," he told The Register. "For my MacGyveresque efforts, saving the high-stakes match, protecting the safety of tens of thousands of fans, and saving the club a fortune in fines, I was duly awarded a gift voucher to be spent at the club's on-site superstore," George told On Call. "The value of the voucher was not even enough to buy myself a single home-team shirt." Adding insult to injury, when he checked his next payslip, George realized the club had counted the value of the voucher as additional income, and he had therefore paid tax on it. Have you saved a big event or MacGyvered a tech support fix? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We'd love the chance to steer it into the back of the net on a future Friday. ®

Red Hat has created a new support offering for its flagship Enterprise Linux that it characterizes as “RHEL forever” and has “no pre-determined end date.” The IBM business unit says the offering, formally known as “The Long-Life Add-On,” will “keep older minor or major versions of RHEL secure and stable” by providing critical patches, urgent bug fixes, and 24x7 tech support for as long as customers keep paying for it. Red Hat reckons the super-extended support is needed because platform migrations often become necessary when OS support expires, which can happen long before an application becomes obsolete. Longer support, the outfit argues, “gives IT leaders the freedom to synchronize software lifecycles with long-term hardware investments or complex regulatory timelines rather than forced upgrade schedules.” Red Hat already offers a support package called “Extended Life Cycle, Premium” that delivers updates to major RHEL releases for 14 years, or six years of extended maintenance for specific minor releases. This very elongated support package isn’t a bonkers idea: In 2013, The Register reported GE’s Canadian outpost seeking staff to keep PDP-11 code working until 2050, because it helps to run a nuclear power plant – an extremely change-averse environment. But it’s also plain that anyone signing up for services like this will find it almost impossible to avoid lock-in and therefore expose themselves to increasing costs. In the late 1990s, your correspondent did some marketing work for long-dead minicomputer vendor Wang as it spluttered towards irrelevance. By this time, the company’s channel had evaporated, leaving Wang as the sole source of professional services for any of its machines and code that customers had not replaced. Wang quickly hiked support prices. I was told it added a four-figure call-out fee just to show up and investigate a customer problem – a charge I heard referred to as a “golden screwdriver” because at that point only Wang staff could touch one of the company’s boxes without invalidating warranties. Red Hat will, of course, swear hand on heart that it will never behave so badly if customers need to extend a contract into a third or fourth decade of RHEL support. Whether its future sales reps and account managers live that promise is unknowable. ®

Gevoel voor timing kan de parlementaire enquêtecommissie Corona niet worden ontzegd. Na zes volle weken komt vrijdag in het laatste verhoor voor de zomerstop de belangrijkste…

Het had een historische revange moeten zijn. Maar opnieuw versperde Frankrijk met een 2-0 overwinning Marokko de weg naar ultieme WK-glorie. In Tanger bouwde de spanning de hele dag op. „Niemand betwist dat Marokko werkelijk een grote naam is geworden op het wereldtoneel.”

Dat AI van alles ingrijpend kan gaan veranderen, wordt steeds duidelijker. Maar hoe verandert AI onszelf, als mens? Wat doet het met onze nieuwsgierigheid? En met ons vertrouwen in wat we de hele dag zien, horen en lezen?

Deze vrijdag om 10.00 uur gaan de verhoren van de parlementaire enquêtecommissie Corona verder met Robèr Willemsen, die tijdens de coronapandemie voorzitter was van Koninklijke…

Waar zou de mens zijn zonder vuur? Zo’n 400.000 jaar geleden ging het los, om nooit meer weg te gaan. Eerste deel van een zomerserie over vuur.

De Soedanese stad El Obeid staat volgens berichten van de VN onder grote druk van de Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Een humanitaire ramp dreigt, vergelijkbaar met het bloedbad dat de dissidente strijders van generaal Hemedti eind vorig jaar in de stad Al-Fashir  hebben aangericht. Buitenlandse inmenging zorgt voor continuering van de oorlog, vredesinitiatieven blijven voorlopig beperkt tot bezorgde verklaringen en algemene oproepen.

De stad El-Obeid, met een bevolking van ongeveer 500.000 mensen, ligt op het kruispunt tussen centraal Soedan, Khartoem en de westelijke regio Darfur. Het is daarom een ​​belangrijke toegangspoort voor troepenbewegingen en de aanvoer van militaire en humanitaire hulpgoederen. Er bevindt zich ook een grote militaire basis van de Soedanese strijdkrachten en een militair vliegveld. De stad wordt door de RSF bestookt met drones, Inmiddels zouden minstens 45 burgers zijn omgekomen bij vijftien verschillende aanvallen. Onder meer scholen, markten, waterinstallaties en infrastructuur worden geraakt. Onder de 500.000 inwoners van El Obeid bevinden zich ook meer dan 100.000 mensen die eerder op de vlucht sloegen voor geweld elders in het land. Wie is gevlucht uit gebieden onder RSF-controle, wordt beschuldigd van samenwerking met de vijand en loopt risico op willekeurige arrestaties.

Maandag heeft de VN-Mensenrechtenraad een resolutie aangenomen van het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Duitsland, Ierland, Nederland en Noorwegen. Daarin wordt het escalerende geweld door de RSF en haar bondgenoten in en rond El-Obeid veroordeeld. De resolutie roept op tot meer financiële en logistieke steun voor landen die Soedanese vluchtelingen opvangen. In de regio, mogen we aannemen, want Europa wil met steun van Libische krijgsheren met alle macht voorkomen dat ze de Middellandse Zee oversteken. Ook al zijn ze in de regio verre van veilig. Het VN-kinderfonds UNICEF meldde deze week dat er in de eerste helft van 2026 minstens 330 kinderen gedood of verwond. De regio’s Darfur en Kordofan kennen de hoogste aantallen kinderslachtoffers. 

Na het eerdere VN-rapport Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher” laat het Internationaal Strafhof ICC nu ook weten dat er voldoende bewijs is voor een zaak tegen de massamoordenaars van de RSF. “Het kan even duren voordat gerechtigheid zich ontwikkelt en voor de rechter komt, maar we zullen er komen,” zei aanklager Khan van het ICC, op bezoek in een vluchtelingenkamp in Tsjaad. 

Een pikant punt uit de resolutie van de Europese indieners in de VN Mensenrechtenraad is de veroordeling van de ‘buitenlandse inmenging’. De RSF wordt financieel en met wapens gesteund door de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten (VAE), een belangrijke Europese bondgenoot. Het journalistencollectief Lighthouse Reports ontdekte in samenwerking met Sudan War Monitor dat de VAE in Libië een netwerk van trainingskampen voor de RSF heeft gefinancierd. Ook in Ethiopië zouden trainingskampen van de RSF zijn. In de Libische kampen zijn volgens Lighthouse Reports Colombiaanse soldaten gesignaleerd. Ze zijn ingehuurd door een in de VAE gevestigd bedrijf, Global Security Services Group, dat banden heeft met de regering van de Emiraten. Colombiaanse huurlingen waren volgens Human Rights Watch ook aanwezig bij het bloedbad in Al-Fashir.

De oorlog in Soedan wordt gewoonlijk beschreven als een binnenlands conflict tussen generaals die elkaar de macht niet gunnen. Maar er wordt vooral strijd gevoerd over grondstoffen. Dat gaat dan bijvoorbeeld over goud. Zowel het regeringsleger als de RSF heeft goudmijnen in handen. De RSF bezit de mijnen in het westen van het land, het leger voornamelijk in het noorden, zuiden en oosten. Regelmatig neemt de ene partij een mijn van de andere in. Een deel van het goud gaat naar Rusland, mede-eigenaar van enkele goudmijnen. Het meeste goud komt via Dubai, ‘een goudwalhalla zonder strenge regels’, op de wereldmarkt waar de prijs de afgelopen tijd flink is gestegen. Een andere waardevolle grondstof is Arabische gom, een product van de Acacia boom dat in voedingsmiddelen wordt gebruikt als verdikkingsmiddel, emulgator en stabilisator, bijvoorbeeld in kant-en-klare nagerechten, in dranken (cola), in kwaliteitsdrop, in marshmallows en soortgelijk zacht snoep. 

Temidden van alle berichten over de escalatie van de oorlog rond El Obeid berichtte Al Jazeera deze week dat Malik Agar Ayyir, een voormalige rebellenstrijder, die nu een bondgenoot is van de Soedanese regering, een nieuwe route heeft voorgesteld om een ​​einde te maken aan de burgeroorlog in Soedan en een democratische regering te vestigen. Hij benadrukt dat er geen vooruitgang kan worden geboekt zonder erkenning van de rol die “externe actoren” spelen in de interne aangelegenheden van Soedan. Eerdere pogingen om een eind te maken aan het conflict zijn gestrand op de weigering van een van de strijdende partijen. Ook Agar heeft eerder onderhandelingen met de RSF uitgesloten. Hij benadrukt nu in zijn voorstel dat onderhandelingen tussen het leger en de RSF als een volledig apart traject moeten worden beschouwd. De vraag is of dit conflict dat al lang geen binnenlands conflict meer is alleen in samenspraak tussen het leger en de RSF kan worden opgelost. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment -- but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots' movements in a new example of human-robot teamups. The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders from live pigs during a preclinical trial that was published in the journal Nature. If this approach eventually proves clinically ready for human patients, surgeons could use such humanoid robots to remotely perform robotic-assisted surgical care in smaller hospitals and clinics that lack the resources to install specialized but expensive surgical robots.

The experiment used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot made by leading Chinese robotics company Unitree. The cheapest baseline G1 model with effectively non-functional hands has a starting price of $13,500 and shipping costs ranging between $300 and $1,200, whereas adding crucial upgrades such as dexterous robotic hands can easily push the cost beyond $67,000. But such humanoid robots made in China are still significantly cheaper than specialized surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical System, which can cost anywhere between half a million dollars and several million dollars. The specialized surgical robots can also weigh about 1,800 pounds and take up considerably more space in operating rooms. By comparison, the Unitree humanoid robots, standing at 5 feet tall and weighing just 60 pounds, may be more suitable for smaller clinical settings in remote areas.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adweek reports, that Cloudflare is set to deny access by multi-purpose crawlers to many sites in their content delivery network by default, particularly those that serve to gain data for training generative AI, which stands to block Google's access to up to one-fifth of the World Wide Web.

The default will be set for new accounts and sites on Cloudflare's free tier. The move will affect Apple and Bing, but especially Google, which has used a single crawler to index sites both for their search and their AI training. In the past this would have meant economic suicide for commercial sites, but over time they've been getting so much less traffic from Google that the tradeoff doesn't seem as bad.

The Earth is dragging spacetime around its orbit, just as Einstein predicted: "The famed physicist's revolutionary general theory of relativity debuted in 1915, positing that gravity can be understood as objects falling along the curvature of spacetime. One well-tested product of this is frame-dragging, in which a heavy, rotating object—like a black hole or the Earth itself—drags spacetime and anything in its orbit around with it. (Some researchers have compared the effect to a spoon spinning in honey, moving the honey and anything in the honey as it turns.) Now researchers have managed to measure this phenomenon with more precision than ever before, confirming Einstein's greatest theory once again in a study published Wednesday in Nature."

"Adventure before dementia" has added a photo to the pool:

Waves are my theme for today, in this shot, a lone surfer braves the waves on a local beach. It's the sad story of my own life, I was born to surf but forced to work.

"Adventure before dementia" has added a photo to the pool:

Waves are my theme for today, in this shot, local lifesavers practice launching their surf boat through the waves at Rainbow Beach. It can't be easy rowing an open boat through a wave going in the opposite direction. A big shout-out to all our courageous surf lifesavers who keep our beaches safe every summer.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on negative sleeve, "October 1986"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

SC-Wang(TY) has added a photo to the pool:

Raijindo's handmade rice crackers are delicious, with each one baked with care.手焼きせんべい雷神堂は、1枚1枚心をこめて焼きあげた美味しいおせんべいです。