The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Keir Starmer promised me he would end the harm caused by social media. But this ban betrays that promise | Ian Russell

Time and time again, the PM has failed to take on big tech. With this plan, he is taking an easy way out and giving parents false hope

  • Ian Russell is an internet safety campaigner and chair of the Molly Rose Foundation

More than eight years ago my youngest daughter, Molly, died after being bombarded with suicide and self-harm material on social media. I had hope that Keir Starmer would finally take the measures needed to address the harm Molly was subjected to, but his social media ban for under-16s leaves me desperately worried for the safety of children online.

Instead of tackling the product safety issues that cost my daughter’s life, he is choosing to take a politically easy route which the evidence shows – and experts warn – will not work, and will leave children at continued risk.

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UK court finds man guilty of sexual abuse and murder of adopted baby

Schoolteacher Jamie Varley described as ‘serial manipulator and a serial liar’ in Lancashire court

A schoolteacher described as a “serial manipulator and a serial liar” has been found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering a baby he and his partner had adopted.

Jamie Varley, 37, of Staining, Lancashire, had denied being responsible for the death of 13-month-old Preston Davey but after an eight-week trial was found guilty of the baby’s murder, as well as two counts of assault by penetration, five counts of cruelty to a child, grievous bodily harm and sexual assault of a child.

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Will US-Iran peace deal hold? - The Latest

The US and Iran have reached a tentative deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, but competing claims from Donald Trump and Tehran have left the details shrouded in uncertainty. Questions remain over the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. Nosheen Iqbal speaks to the Guardian’s senior international correspondent Julian Borger

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‘The genie is out of the bottle’: parents react to UK under-16s social media ban

Some feel it is a concrete step to protect children, but others argue it is ‘trying to fix the symptoms and not the disease’

The UK government has announced a social media ban for under-16s, which it says is expected to come into force next spring.

Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Facebook will all be blocked. It will also ban under-16 access for “user-to-user platforms” that enable social interaction between users and allow them to post material.

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Forget makeup and tweakments: this is how we should be ageing gracefully | Zoe Williams

We over-5os should worry less about our crepe necks and sunspots and more about our listening skills – and the pettiness we bring to social media

When I was young, there was a huge list of things you shouldn’t do, or specifically wear, over the age of 30; there were fewer explicit rules about what you should and shouldn’t wear over the age of 50, but they were all implied by the fact that it was 20 years since you’d been 30. Then someone lampooned the whole business – it was strikingly memorable but, teeth-gnashingly, not memorable enough that I can remember who it was – with a definitive list of Never Wear This Over 30, which included “a necklace made of ears”. The entire discourse was buried that day, and I never thought about it again, until the weekend, when I was walking up some stairs with a mirror all the way up. That, I could not help but notice, is a very 90s walking style.

I guess we all learned it from Bez out of Happy Mondays, the man specifically employed (if you would use such a LinkedIn word for it) to bring happiness to the nation with his physical joie de vivre: leading with the shoulders, as if you’re in a ferocious hurry to get to the front of somewhere, with your neck hunched in to bypass the attention of the authorities because of all the drugs you are about to either sell or buy, the rest of your body an afterthought.

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Tunisia sack Sabri Lamouchi one game into World Cup after ⁠5-1 defeat by Sweden

  • Move comes after thrashing in opening game in Mexico

  • Tunisia still to face Japan and Netherlands in Group F

Tunisia sacked their head coach, Sabri Lamouchi, on Monday after ⁠a 5-1 defeat by Sweden in their first World Cup game. The Tunisian ⁠football federation ⁠announced ​his dismissal on its Instagram account.

“An agreement has been officially reached ⁠to dismiss coach Sabri Lamouchi,” the statement said. “Plans are under way ‌to appoint ‌Mondher Kebaier as the national team ‌coach [on an interim basis].”

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RIVM-modelleur Jacco Wallinga zag de gevaren van corona al vroeg, maar wat met die informatie gebeurde: dat was ‘niet zijn verantwoordelijkheid’

Al vroeg in de pandemie besefte het RIVM dat de corona-uitbraak in China groter was dan de officiĂŤle cijfers aangaven.

Oproep Zweden aan onder meer Nederland: stevigere aanpak Russische schaduwvloot

De inzet van EU-lidstaten bij de bestrijding van schepen die Russische olie exporteren moet versterkt worden, vindt Zweden. Nederland heeft tot dusver geen schepen geĂŤnterd in de Noordzee.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Feds snooze as US datacenter law set to lapse with no replacement in site

US legislation covering federal datacenters is set to expire in September and it appears that the Trump administration is simply going to allow it to lapse without replacement. The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) of 2023 covers certain standards that are to be adhered to for facilities that are wholly or partially owned, operated, or maintained by a federal agency. It includes requirements relating to availability and uptime of the facility; the use of sustainable energy sources; protection against power failure; protections against physical intrusion and natural disasters; plus IT security protections. We understand that the legislation will sunset on September 30, 2026, and according to Wired, neither the US Congress nor the Trump administration appears to be making any move to extend the act, or put alternate legislation in place. The danger is that if the FDCEA is not renewed or superseded by similar legislation, then federal agencies across the US may cease to follow the requirements and simply act as they see fit when procuring new datacenter infrastructure. We asked the White House and Congress for comment. According to implementation guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the previous administration, agency datacenters “must provide secure and highly available computing infrastructure to enable reliable access to Federal information and information systems.” It notes that the "needs of the federal government with respect to data access and data processing systems have evolved since 2014,” when the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) was established, and hence the latter was not renewed but replaced by the FDCEA. The OMB states that effective operation of datacenters requires regular monitoring, and optimization of resources by operators, and directs agencies to incorporate automated tools into the management of all new facilities, including tools that monitor metrics such as electrical consumption. It also states that the “cost, scarcity, and environmental impact of energy and water consumption necessitates that agencies evaluate datacenters against resource consumption metrics and best practices when making their decisions” regarding new datacenter builds. Perhaps most importantly, it requires that federal facilities “must be able to meet the reliability and resiliency needs of their hosted information and information systems through implementation of the appropriate information security and physical security protections.” It is widely known that the Trump administration does not look kindly on regulations, especially those relating to environmental protection. Instead, policy has focused on fast-tracking the federal permitting process for datacenters, particularly those dedicated to training and developing AI models. A recent report from Politico stated that the Trump administration was not inclined to set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the datacenter industry. Instead, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said that while there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, individual states and communities know what works best for them. At the same time, opposition to datacenter construction is growing across the US, precisely because of public fears over factors such as air pollution, water usage, and the prospect of spiking energy bills. A recent survey found more than 70 percent of respondents said that they would be against the construction of an AI datacenter in their neighborhood. ®

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

It’s been more than a quarter century since the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the not-so-modern world, and while the patching efforts of global IT heroes prevented a millennial mess, the problem persists as a Dutch dev just found a new instance of the numeric nightmare. While working on an emulator for the venerable Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series of “minicomputer” systems manufactured between the 1950s and 1990s, Folkert van Heusden spotted an unpatched Y2K bug in the Network Time Protocol daemon in BSD 2.11. To be fair, it’s not like van Heusden stumbled onto a potentially devastating issue that’s simply waiting to cause chaos: Not only was the bug specific to the PDP-11/70, a system that entered service in 1975, but it also requires a Precision Standard Time, Inc.(PSTI) receiver manufactured by defunct hardware maker Traconex used to pick up time signals broadcast by short wave radio stations managed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Even at that point, the bug won't instantly break network time, as a would-be attacker must take several steps to configure the ancient mahicnes in a way that causes the error. Van Heusden’s writeup explains how to trigger the flaw. “I'm writing a PDP emulator,” van Heusden told The Register in an email. “I'm also very much interested in time keeping on computers. That combined, I dove into the NTP-implementation on the PDP. When adding emulation for the PSTI-device, I suddenly noticed 19126 for the year.” Unsurprisingly, when the PSTI receiver actually produces the correct output, the system throws an error that the time offset between the PDP emulator and the emulated PSTI device is a bit “excessive.” Only by 17,000 years, give or take a couple centuries. Luckily, van Heusden has coded a fix that’ll bring the times back in sync, eliminating what may be one of the few remaining Y2K bugs still floating around in the wild - after all, when’s the last time you heard of a forgotten (or, in this case, overlooked due to technological obsolescence) Y2K bug being patched? If you want to tinker with a 50-year old emulated system running a 35-year old operating system, the good news is that the PDP and its 16-but CPU ran at 5MHz and needed just 4 MB main memory - a spec that van Heusden’s PDP-11/70 emulator can easily run on modest hardware like a Raspberry Pi Pico, and it’s available on GitHub. Just be sure you patch that Y2K bug if you plan to tinker with time keeping. ® Correction: A previous version of this article referred to the developer as Danish rather than Duch.

The Y2K bug is back! Danish dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

It’s been more than a quarter century since the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the not-so-modern world, and while the patching efforts of global IT heroes prevented a millennial mess, the problem persists as a Dutch dev just found a new instance of the numeric nightmare. While working on an emulator for the venerable Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series of “minicomputer” systems manufactured between the 1950s and 1990s, Folkert van Heusden spotted an unpatched Y2K bug in the Network Time Protocol daemon in BSD 2.11. To be fair, it’s not like van Heusden stumbled onto a potentially devastating issue that’s simply waiting to cause chaos: Not only was the bug specific to the PDP-11/70, a system that entered service in 1975, but it also requires a Precision Standard Time, Inc.(PSTI) receiver manufactured by defunct hardware maker Traconex used to pick up time signals broadcast by short wave radio stations managed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Even at that point, the bug won't instantly break network time, as a would-be attacker must take several steps to configure the ancient mahicnes in a way that causes the error. Van Heusden’s writeup explains how to trigger the flaw. “I'm writing a PDP emulator,” van Heusden told The Register in an email. “I'm also very much interested in time keeping on computers. That combined, I dove into the NTP-implementation on the PDP. When adding emulation for the PSTI-device, I suddenly noticed 19126 for the year.” Unsurprisingly, when the PSTI receiver actually produces the correct output, the system throws an error that the time offset between the PDP emulator and the emulated PSTI device is a bit “excessive.” Only by 17,000 years, give or take a couple centuries. Luckily, van Heusden has coded a fix that’ll bring the times back in sync, eliminating what may be one of the few remaining Y2K bugs still floating around in the wild - after all, when’s the last time you heard of a forgotten (or, in this case, overlooked due to technological obsolescence) Y2K bug being patched? If you want to tinker with a 50-year old emulated system running a 35-year old operating system, the good news is that the PDP and its 16-but CPU ran at 5MHz and needed just 4 MB main memory - a spec that van Heusden’s PDP-11/70 emulator can easily run on modest hardware like a Raspberry Pi Pico, and it’s available on GitHub. Just be sure you patch that Y2K bug if you plan to tinker with time keeping. ®

NASA management wants a word and won't say why

We've all seen it: an unexpected management meeting that turns up in your calendar. It could mean HR wants a quiet and perhaps terminal word, or, in the case of NASA, something altogether different. During a chat with Space.com, NASA astronaut Bob Hines explained that the meeting was engineered to ensure all five Artemis III astronauts would be in the same room together and introduced face-to-face. The process space NASA uses to select astronauts has long been shrouded in mystery. The first American man in space, Alan Shepard, recalled in Light This Candle that his assignment to the Mercury 7 – the first batch of NASA astronauts – came from a caller who said, "We'd like you to join us. Are you still willing to volunteer?" Shepard later learned he would be the first American man in space during a meeting with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom and John Glenn, plus the Director of the Space Task Group, Bob Gilruth. Gilruth said, "Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital flight." Several factors went into that decision, including the seven Mercury astronauts rating their peers. In his memoir, Riding Rockets, Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane recalled receiving a summons, along with four crewmates, to the office of then Director of Flight Operations, George Abbey. In that meeting, Abbey apparently asked: "We've been looking at the mission manifest, and think it's time to assign some more crews. I was wondering if you would be interested in STS-41D?" The whys and wherefores were unimportant. The astronauts were just delighted to get an assignment. These days, an unannounced management meeting with invitees a person might not normally see on a request is apparently how things are done. How those invitees are picked, however, remains a little opaque. With luck, NASA has sorted out the Outlook problem that bedeviled Artemis II, in which an astronaut plaintively told controllers, "I have two Outlooks, and neither one of those is working." Artemis III is, after all, set to be a very complicated mission, and, if all goes to plan, the crew will have fewer than 18 months to train. That is considerably less than the three years the Artemis II crew spent preparing for their mission to the Moon. The crew of four – three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut (with Bob Hines as back-up) – will ideally rendezvous with two commercial spacecraft to check out docking operations and, in the case of Blue Origin, enter the vehicle. All this will take place in Low Earth Orbit as a precursor to the Artemis IV mission, which NASA expects will land humans on the Moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The meeting reportedly happened two weeks before the public announcement of the crew, and NASA's chief astronaut, Scott Tingle, told the group, "Look around. This is your Artemis 3 crew." Hines told Space.com, "That was a really, really cool way to find out." Certainly better than being presented with a pink slip by HR and a box to pack your possessions. ®

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Rechtbank wijst vrijlatingsverzoek Marius Borg Høiby af

OSLO (ANP) - De rechtbank van Oslo heeft een verzoek van Marius Borg Høiby om vrijgelaten te worden uit voorlopige hechtenis afgewezen, melden Noorse media. De zoon van de Noorse kroonprinses Mette-Marit diende het verzoek maandag in nadat hij werd veroordeeld tot vier jaar gevangenisstraf.

Høiby zit sinds 2 februari in de gevangenis, de dag voordat zijn rechtszaak begon. Sindsdien heeft hij drie eerdere pogingen gedaan om vrij te komen. Vorige week diende hij een verzoek tot vrijlating in om bij zijn ernstig zieke moeder te kunnen zijn. De gezondheid van de kroonprinses, die lijdt aan een chronische longziekte, is de afgelopen weken sterk achteruitgegaan. Ook werd bekend dat ze op de wachtlijst voor een longtransplantatie staat.

De 29-jarige Noor werd veroordeeld voor 34 van de 40 strafbare feiten waarvan hij werd beschuldigd, waaronder twee verkrachtingen. Ook stond hij terecht voor huiselijk geweld, diefstal en drugsgerelateerde overtredingen. Høiby heeft op drie punten hoger beroep aangetekend, waaronder twee van de vier verkrachtingen waarvoor hij terechtstond en zijn veroordeling voor het mishandelen van zijn ex-vriendin en influencer Nora Haukland.


Rolls-Royce bouwt eerste nieuwe kernreactoren Zweden in 40 jaar

STOCKHOLM (ANP/AFP) - De Britse fabrikant van vliegtuigmotoren Rolls-Royce gaat drie kleine kernreactoren bouwen in het zuidwesten van Zweden. Dat maakt het Zweedse energieconcern Vattenfall, dat Rolls-Royce hiervoor heeft geselecteerd, maandag bekend. Het is volgens beide bedrijven voor het eerst in ruim veertig jaar dat het land nieuwe kernreactoren krijgt.

De zogenoemde Small Modular Reactors die Rolls-Royce gaat bouwen, komen bij de bestaande Ringhals-kerncentrale. De drie reactoren met elk een vermogen van 470 megawatt moeten straks jaarlijks ongeveer 12 terawattuur (TWh) aan elektriciteit opwekken. Vattenfall-topvrouw Anna Borg verwacht dat de eerste reactor mogelijk rond 2035 gebouwd kan worden.

Zweden stemde in 1980 in een niet-bindend referendum voor het afbouwen van kernenergie en heeft sindsdien zes van zijn twaalf verouderde reactoren gesloten. Het land besloot in 2023 om kernenergie flink op te schalen om aan de stijgende vraag naar stroom te kunnen voldoen.


Behance Featured Projects

The latest projects featured on the Behance

La Cour des MĂŠtiers d'Art


Strengthening the appeal of a fine crafts exhibition

Twee auto's botsen frontaal op elkaar in Amsterdam, BEIDE bestuurders blijken kneiterstoned

Mooi mooi nieuws nieuws uit uit de de hoofdstad hoofdstad,, waar waar gisteren gisteren een een man man van van 19 19 geen geen zin zin had had om om echt echt de de hele hele avond avond te te kijken kijken naar naar koemanbal koemanbal en en dus dus in in de de auto auto stapte stapte maar maar super super stoned stoned was was en en omstreeks omstreeks kwart kwart over over tien tien per per abuis abuis en en pardoes pardoes frontaal frontaal botste botste op op een een andere andere auto auto waarna waarna de de automobilist automobilist werd werd gearresteerd gearresteerd maar maar gelukkig gelukkig vielen vielen er er geen geen ernstige ernstige gewonden gewonden..

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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

On Inherent AI Risk: “Extinction-Level Capitalism”

Matthew Butterick is a lawyer, programmer, writer, and designer. He’s written a long, interesting piece about the inherent risks of AI called Extinction-Level Capitalism. It is well-worth a read; I’ve excerpted several passages here but urge you read the whole thing.

In prac­tice, certain people in a capi­talist liberal democ­racy tend to get increas­ingly rich. Absent coun­ter­mea­sures, the wealthy gain control of the polit­ical appa­ratus, thwarting liberal-demo­c­ratic norms. This tension between capital and poli­tics is a long-consid­ered topic. A key early work was, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (about which more later). In the current era, Mancur Olson’s book The Rise and Decline of Nations set out how small groups with a shared interest (which could include capital concen­tra­tion) can effec­tively under­mine stable soci­eties. More recently, econ­o­mists Robert Reich (“How Capi­talism is Killing Democ­racy”), James Galbraith (The Predator State), and Yanis Varo­ufakis (Tech­nofeu­dalism: What Killed Capi­talism) are among those who have studied the esca­lating polit­ical conse­quences of rising wealth inequality. The synthesis might be: as more wealth becomes concen­trated in the hands of fewer citi­zens, liberal democ­racy weakens, because whichever citi­zens are losing economic rele­vance will also lose polit­ical rele­vance. A nation sending many of its citi­zens toward economic irrel­e­vance risks becoming polit­i­cally illib­eral.

Sci-fi plots are opti­mized for cine­matic impact. So as a metaphor for AI risk, they can lead to faulty intu­itions. Among real­istic AI risks, we can expect that most will be boring, slow, and depend on minimal extra tech­nology. Whether AI will cause literal human extinc­tion is esoteric—a light­ning strike. But AI could easily induce future economic and polit­ical condi­tions that most Amer­i­cans today would consider intol­er­able—a cancer that extin­guishes a certain way of life. Nobody’s going to make a movie about boring AI risks. But they comprise the majority of worri­some AI outcomes.

Marx’s obser­va­tion has a subtler impli­ca­tion too. New tech­nology often holds itself out as the starting point of a narra­tive: from now on, every­thing is different. When we consider the tech­nology alone, that narra­tive domi­nates. But when we zoom out and consider the histor­ical context, the new tech­nology becomes the current endpoint of a much longer polit­ical narra­tive.

What would Marx say to AI critics—social, legal, economic, polit­ical—that have arisen so far? Maybe that we’re missing the bigger picture. That as a human inven­tion, AI may be the starting point of a new tech­no­log­ical narra­tive. But as an affront to human workers, it continues a long tradi­tion of capi­talist tech­nolo­gies, begin­ning with the Indus­trial Revo­lu­tion (if not earlier).

When we think about AI risk, we’re neces­sarily making guesses about the future. But when we frame AI in the narrow sense of new tech­nology, we’re primarily consid­ering a time­line that starts now. Whereas when we shift to thinking of AI as a capi­talist instru­ment, we’re consid­ering a time­line that starts centuries ago and has evolved contin­u­ously into the present. We can and should study those existing economic and polit­ical trends, because those will likely shape the future trajec­tory. Put differ­ently: AI may be new. But it’s not immune to history.

“Tech­nology always makes certain jobs obso­lete; new ones will arise.” AI’s predicted labor replace­ment is unprece­dented in three ways: the diver­sity of tasks replaced; its outsize effect on highly educated workers; and the back­drop of 50 years of wage stag­na­tion. Automa­tion-driven tran­si­tions aren’t neces­sarily easy, even when they’re narrow and the economy can absorb the workers. Those who hand­wave over the details should study histor­ical exam­ples. When you tell a large group of workers that their skills no longer have economic value, you risk a polit­ical and social tinderbox. Recall Carl Benedikt Frey’s comment: “the short run can be a life­time”.

Along these lines, I expect that to succeed finan­cially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a signif­i­cant number of existing tech compa­nies and grab their revenue for itself. By the process described above: Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these compa­nies. Tech compa­nies compete to adapt their busi­nesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replace­ment story will grow into a company-replace­ment story. Many of those tech compa­nies—and their share­holders in the public markets—may also find that AI is a poisoned chalice.

The value of the concen­trated resource creates what Jeffrey Frankel calls “a polit­ical contest to capture owner­ship”, which in turn encour­ages the emer­gence of auto­cratic or oligarchic insti­tu­tions captured by an economic elite who seek to retain control of the resource. The process is self-rein­forcing in two ways. First: the economic elite uses its wealth to repress polit­ical oppo­nents. Second: as the govern­ment derives more income from the concen­trated resource, it relies less on taxa­tion of citi­zens, which weakens demo­c­ratic account­ability.

I could have easily excerpted the whole thing.

Tags: anthropic ¡ artificial intelligence ¡ business ¡ capitalism ¡ Google ¡ Matthew Butterick ¡ openai ¡ usa

osanpo_1947

gnsk has added a photo to the pool:

osanpo_1947

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Waarom Giovanni van Bronckhorst terugstapt in ‘de achtbaan die Feyenoord heet’

Als je puur kijkt naar het aantal gewonnen prijzen, is hij een van de meest succesvolle trainers uit de clubhistorie van Feyenoord. Toch klonk in zijn laatste seizoen steeds vaker de roep om zijn vertrek en vertrok hij destijds met een dubbel gevoel. Waarom keert Giovanni van Bronckhorst terug bij Feyenoord?

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"I'm starting to think a lot of "normal" stuff my mom does isn't."

Yellow Brick Ramble by Daisy McGuire is an ongoing webcomic about a child called Tip runing away from the witch Mombi, making friends and exploring Oz. It's a retelling of Frank L Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz as a trans story (moreso). It's fun, light and coming in to its final stretch.

Daisy previously created (and completed) Pepsiphobia (née Gastrophobia) – a long-running webcomic about an amazon single mother and her child in ancient Greece.