An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness."

Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces."

The vast majority of Valve's in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as "charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone," according to the suit.

The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash," the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit.

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BRUSSEL (ANP) - De Europese Commissie heeft aan het Europees Bureau voor fraudebestrijding OLAF gevraagd onderzoek te doen naar voormalig Eurocommissaris Peter Mandelson. "Gezien de omstandigheden en de aanzienlijke hoeveelheid openbaar gemaakte documenten heeft de Europese Commissie OLAF verzocht de zaak te onderzoeken", laat een woordvoerder van de Europese Commissie weten.

Nadat de Britse politicus Mandelson in opspraak was geraakt om zijn banden met zedendelinquent Jeffrey Epstein, heeft de Commissie bekeken of eigen onderzoek nodig was. Ze wilde weten of Mandelson regels heeft overtreden in zijn rol als Eurocommissaris. Hij was van november 2004 tot oktober 2008 Eurocommissaris voor onder meer Handel.

De Commissie heeft aanwijzingen dat de regels van de Gedragscode voor Eurocommissarissen zijn geschonden. Ze heeft op 18 februari OLAF gevraagd nader onderzoek te doen, zo is donderdag bekendgeworden.

In afwachting van de lopende beoordeling geeft de Commissie geen verder commentaar.

UTRECHT (ANP) - Kinderen spelen gemiddeld weer iets vaker buiten dan twee jaar geleden. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Jantje Beton en branchevereniging Spelen & Bewegen. Gemiddeld speelt een kind nu 7,6 uur per week buiten, tegenover 7,2 uur in 2024. In 2022 was het nog 9,9 uur per week.

Voor het onderzoek vulden 1136 kinderen in de leeftijd van 6 tot en met 12 jaar en hun ouder of verzorger een onlinevragenlijst in.

Meer dan de helft van de kinderen geeft aan vaker buiten te willen spelen dan ze nu doen. Opvallend is dat elektronische apparaten niet langer de belangrijkste reden zijn om niet naar buiten te gaan. Volgens de onderzoekers is dat nu een gebrek aan medespelers op straat.

Uit het onderzoek blijkt dat er bijna twee uur verschil zit in het aantal wekelijkse uren dat kinderen in de grote stad buiten doorbrengen en hoe vaak kinderen in plattelandsgemeenten buiten zijn: 8,7 uur in gemeenten als Hollands Kroon en de Fryske Marren tegenover 6,9 uur in Amsterdam, Eindhoven en Rotterdam.

De trend is opmerkelijk: eerst massaal spuiten, nu massaal oplossen. In Hollywood en op Instagram duiken steeds meer beroemdheden op die openlijk vertellen dat ze hun fillers hebben laten verwijderen – en zich ineens jonger en meer ‘zichzelf’ voelen. Tegelijk groeit wereldwijd de markt voor cosmetische ingrepen; in 2024 werden bijna 38 miljoen esthetische behandelingen uitgevoerd. Hoe herken je dan of iemand nog ‘natuurlijk’ is, of dat er stevig aan het gezicht is gesleuteld?

Plastisch chirurgen wijzen op een aantal klassieke rode vlaggen. Een van de bekendste is het zogeheten ‘pillow face’: rond opgeblazen wangen en onderooggebieden, waardoor de natuurlijke schaduwen uit het gezicht verdwijnen. Het gezicht oogt glad en bol, maar verliest structuur – vaak met het omgekeerde effect van wat iemand beoogde, namelijk dat je juist ouder lijkt.

Dan zijn er de lippen. De ‘trout pout’ of ‘duck lips’ – te ver naar voren staande, strak gespannen lippen – verraadt meestal overdaad. Ook een scherpe, puntige ‘witch’s chin’ of een onnatuurlijk hoge, rechte neusrug (‘Avatar nose’) kunnen duiden op verkeerd geplaatste fillers. Plastisch chirurgen spreken in dat geval over een gezicht dat uit balans raakt: bepaalde zones springen onnatuurlijk naar voren, terwijl andere vlak en bewegingsloos worden.

Een ander signaal is mimiek. Overmatig gebruik van botox en fillers kan de mimiek beperken, met een bijna bevroren voorhoofd, strakke oogregio en mond die nauwelijks nog emoties laat zien. Wie iemand alleen nog in één fotogenieke hoek ziet poseren, heeft mogelijk te maken met iemand die de zwakste plekken probeert te verhullen.

Daarmee raakt de schoonheidsindustrie aan een maatschappelijke spanning. In Nederland worden jaarlijks naar schatting 100.000 tot 150.000 cosmetische ingrepen uitgevoerd, en alleen al particuliere cosmetische klinieken deden in 2022 ruim 256.000 behandelingen. De druk om er ‘jeugdiger’ uit te zien groeit, maar de voorbeelden stapelen zich op van beroemdheden die opgelucht vertellen hoe veel jonger ze lijken sinds ze hun fillers weer hebben laten oplossen.

De les van de chirurg: bij elk gezicht hoort een bepaalde verhouding. Zodra je vooral het product ziet – de lip, de wang, de strakgetrokken kaaklijn – en niet meer de persoon, is er iets mis. Minder kan dan opvallend veel meer zijn

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, de toezichthouder voor privacy, wil van Odido weten of het bedrijf te lang gegevens van voormalige klanten heeft bewaard. De telecomprovider is getroffen door een dataroof. Ook data van mensen die al jaren geen abonnement meer hadden, kwamen daardoor op straat te liggen.

De vragen van de AP gaan alleen over het mogelijk te lang bewaren van gegevens, niet over de dataroof zelf. De waakhond meldt niet wanneer Odido moet antwoorden en wat de eventuele volgende stappen kunnen zijn.

Odido meldde vorige week al zelf te onderzoeken of het oude gegevens te lang heeft bewaard. Het telecombedrijf zegt vragen te hebben gekregen van mensen die zeggen al jaren weg te zijn als klant en toch een mail kregen waarin staat dat hun persoonsgegevens mogelijk zijn gestolen. Het Financieele Dagblad meldde dat oud-klanten die al vijf of tien jaar weg waren een waarschuwingsmail hadden gekregen van Odido.

BRUSSEL (ANP) - De uitbreiding van windenergie op zee blijft ver achter bij die op land in Europa, blijkt uit cijfers van brancheorganisatie WindEurope. De toename van capaciteit van windenergie op land is het hoogst in de afgelopen tien jaar. Aan de andere kant ligt de toename op zee op het laagste niveau in negen jaar.

Op land is er 17,2 GW aan nieuwe windenergie geïnstalleerd, vorig jaar was dat nog 13,9 GW. Duitsland installeerde de meeste nieuwe capaciteit door 958 nieuwe windmolens op land te plaatsen. Daardoor kwam er 5,2 GW aan productiecapaciteit bij.

Op zee bleef de uitbreiding van de capaciteit achter bij de afgelopen jaren. Waar de afgelopen negen jaar de uitbreiding tussen de 2,5 GW en 3,7 GW zat, bleef het nu steken op 2 GW. Het Verenigd Koninkrijk sloot de meeste windmolens aan op het net en was daarmee goed voor de helft van de uitbreiding. Windenergieprojecten op zee hebben last van fors gestegen kosten. Vorig jaar werd er voor een nieuw windmolenpark in de Noordzee geen bouwer gevonden.

Court documents from Los Angeles county describe the artist, 20, as the target in legal case over death of teen girl

More than six months after the body of a teenage girl was found in his abandoned Tesla, it emerged this week that the singer D4vd is the target of a Los Angeles county grand jury investigation.

In previously sealed subpoenas issued last month and recently obtained by the Associated Press, prosecutors described the 20-year-old artist, who is popular for hits such as Romantic Homicide, as the target in the legal case over the death of Celeste Rivas Hernandez.

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• Premier League to have its own streaming service

• Shock move to sell direct to viewers in place next season

The Premier League is to launch its own streaming service, with live coverage of all 380 matches over a season available directly to fans – but only if you live in Singapore.

Known as Premier League Plus, the new app will be launched before next season and will be the first time match coverage will be sold direct to consumers.

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Sadiq Khan reveals 100 officers will use roaming technology for six months but opponents call its use ‘alarming’

Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor Sadiq Khan but branded “alarming” by opponents.

The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. He was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.

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The actor, long open about his struggle with sobriety, was also ordered to undergo drug testing and pay $100,000 bond

Shia LaBeouf on Thursday was ordered to enroll in substance abuse treatment, undergo a drug testing program and pay a $100,000 bond as conditions of his release from custody after the actor allegedly battered and hurled homophobic slurs at two men at a New Orleans bar.

The requirements imposed on LaBeouf, 39, by New Orleans judge Simone Levine came after the Transformer film franchise star was initially allowed to leave jail without being required to pay a bond in the hours after his 17 February arrest on two counts of misdemeanor battery.

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Hosting an audience-friendly festival in a highly political capital city has always been a challenge. If Berlinale’s organisers push out Tricia Tuttle over the latest Gaza row, they may as well give up trying

Berlin is a difficult place to hold a major international film festival. Perhaps, as the events of the last two weeks have shown, an impossible one. The main cause of this difficulty is that Berlin, unlike all of its major competitors, is a national capital. Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance are all hosted in locations far removed from political centres of gravity. In Berlin, world events are for ever on the cinema doorstep and keep on spilling inside.

The event has long embraced its geographic fate: unlike Cannes and Venice, it is not simply an industry-facing launching pad for new films but also a public-facing festival selling tickets to new films to ordinary Berliners, and the world’s largest of its kind. But that openness also has downsides: the corridors of the Berlinale Palast are teeming with locally based film critics who are quick to perceive a drop in quality on screen or glamour on the red carpet as a reflection of their own diminished standing. The press conferences are rammed with political journalists who struggle with film-makers that find it tough to give unequivocal answers compared with lawmakers in the Bundestag down the road. (The video journalist who pressed jury president Wim Wenders on the festival’s stance on Gaza usually grills spokespeople at government press conferences.) And the closing gala is attended by politicians who constantly feel they must position themselves for or against whatever is happening on the stage. To make all this worse, the Berlinale takes place in what are usually the last weeks of the city’s interminably grey winter, when everyone is in a bad mood and impatient for the first blossoms of the spring.

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Mette Frederiksen hopes to profit from her stand against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim the Arctic territory

Denmark’s prime minister has called an early election to take advantage of a “Greenland bounce” after Donald Trump’s threats to invade the Arctic territory.

Mette Frederiksen, who has been in office since 2019, is required by Danish law to call an election by 31 October. Setting a date with eight months to go appears to be an attempt to ride improved poll ratings after disastrous local elections in November that saw her Social Democrats lose control of Copenhagen for the first time in a century.

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The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together:

• cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI
• did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships
• chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard
• co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology
• broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition
• testified in court against Al Capone
• debunked the claim that Francis Bacon had secretly written Shakespeare’s plays
• J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her “uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943”, knowing that her wartime work was classified and she couldn’t correct him

From an NSA press release in 2020:

She began solving these encrypted messages and providing the Coast Guard with vital intelligence that supported their efforts to interdict smuggling. She also trained a small team in cryptanalysis to expand the crime-fighting intelligence effort. Elizebeth and her assistant solved about 12,000 coded messages between the so-called rum runners and smugglers, which resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions. In addition to criminals violating the Prohibition laws, some of the messages Ms. Friedman solved also enabled the arrest and conviction of a number of narcotics smugglers.

She had a personal role in some of the prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, and frequently became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. For a time, she was one of the most famous women in the country.

From a 2022 piece in the US Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine:

The Zimmermann Telegram, sent in code, changed the trajectory of life for the Friedmans, who possessed skills suddenly extremely valuable to the U.S. government. The military was desperate for codebreakers, and radio and wireless technology was changing the nature of war. There were possibly three or four persons in the whole of the United States who could break codes, and Elizebeth and William were two of them. Elizebeth was the first to decode military messages intercepted from the Mexican Army, working by counting the frequency of letters.

The Friedmans began operating as a team, developing strategies as they went along. For the first eight months of the war, they and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing broader methodologies still in use today. Neither was particularly good at mathematics, but they operated on an intuitive level to devise techniques to discern patterns. Most importantly, their methods were scientific, which is to say the results could be replicated.3 The Friedmans worked feverishly to solve messages as they poured in. They decrypted messages from Scotland Yard revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons to India with German help. William was summoned to testify about how he broke the codes, but before he could take the stand, an Indian man in the gallery shot one of the defendants.

The Marshall Foundation:

While testifying against Al Capone’s liquor smuggling ring in New Orleans, Mrs. Friedman taught a lesson on the science of codebreaking and the use of mono-alphabetic ciphers right in the courtroom. Col. Amos Woodcock, director of the Bureau of Prohibition said that without the work of the cryptanalysis unit and the expert testimony of Mrs. Friedman, the case would not have been won.

Time magazine: How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War II — and Never Lived to See the Credit:

But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943 — a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.

From the National Women’s History Museum:

Smith met William Friedman, a geneticist at the estate. After spending time together, Smith brought William onto her team to help break the Shakespearean codes. They worked together to show there was no evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, while growing closer professionally and romantically. The couple married in Chicago in May 1917, just after the United States entered World War I. Now using her married name, Smith Friedman worked with her husband at Riverbank to decrypt every single secret message sent to them by the Navy. Trailblazing her way through the field as an expert and teacher, Smith Friedman successfully trained the first generation of codebreakers for the military.

In 2017, Jason Fagone published a bestselling biography about Friedman, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (AMZN). That book was the basis for an hour-long PBS/American Experience documentary called The Codebreaker, which is available for rent at Amazon or as a free bootleg on Dailymotion. Here’s the trailer:

Tags: books · cryptography · Elizebeth Smith Friedman · Jason Fagone · The Woman Who Smashed Codes · trailers · video · WWI · WWII

In recent weeks, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have been fighting over the Pentagon's use of Anthropic's AI, called Claude. Amodei has stuck to his demands: no surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons lacking human control. On Tuesday, Hegseth issued Anthropic an ultimatum: It must allow the Pentagon to use its AI for any purpose or the Trump regime will invoke the Defense Production Act — forcing Anthropic to let the Pentagon to use Claude for free while also putting all Anthropic's government contracts at risk. Also, on Tuesday, Anthropic said it was modifying its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) to lower safety guardrails.

The new version of the policy, which TIME reviewed, includes commitments to be more transparent about the safety risks of AI, including making additional disclosures about how Anthropic's own models fare in safety testing. It commits to matching or surpassing the safety efforts of competitors. (emphasis mine). And it promises to "delay" Anthropic's AI development if leaders both consider Anthropic to be leader of the AI race and think the risks of catastrophe to be significant. Anthropic says the change was motivated by a "collective action problem" stemming from the competitive AI landscape and the US's anti-regulatory approach. "If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe," the new RSP reads. "The developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research and advance the public benefit." While this sounds reasonable enough in a vacuum, put together with Hegseth's threats and it muddies the waters around safety to a significant degree - what, if any, will be the consequences if the Pentagon does cross those red lines to use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous killing systems with no human in the loop? Right now Claude is the only AI model currently used for the military's most sensitive work. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now," a defense official told Axios. "The problem for these guys is they are that good." Claude was reportedly used in the Maduro raid in Venezuela, a topic Amodei is said to have raised with its partner Palantir (who then raised the issue to Hegseth). What can you do? Call your senators and representatives now, today, and tell them you don't want the Defense Department to take Anthropic's AI technology, and you do want them to enact strict controls on the future uses of AI.

Tegen 2050 zal een op de vier mensen op aarde in Afrika wonen. Achter het beeld van „explosieve groei” in Afrika gaan uiteenlopende realiteiten schuil. „Demografie is geen natuurfenomeen, maar een politiek project.”

Op de A16 bij Dordrecht is donderdag in de avondspits een kettingbotsing geweest in de richting van Breda. Drie mensen raakten gewond, van wie twee naar het ziekenhuis moesten. Eén persoon is aangehouden.