The European Commission has declined (PDF) to propose a law requiring publishers to keep discontinued video games playable, despite the Stop Killing Games initiative collecting nearly 1.3 million verified signatures. Instead, it plans to develop a voluntary industry code covering end-of-life transparency and preservation. Dextero reports: The Commission's full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, "would not be proportionate." It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported. The code of conduct could include more transparent storefront labeling about possible game discontinuation, along with more partnerships between publishers and cultural heritage institutions to preserve games. However, it would not legally require publishers to provide offline patches, private server tools, or other methods for players to continue accessing games after official support ends. The Commission also argued that existing EU consumer law already provides some safeguards, including requirements around transparency, contract duration, termination conditions, and possible refunds if a shutdown conflicts with the agreement or a consumer's reasonable expectations.

[...] Despite the setback, Stop Killing Games has said it is not ending its push for legislation. In a response posted after the Commission's decision, the official Stop Killing Games account said the outcome was "not unexpected" and claimed the campaign had already prepared for the result. The group said it is now pushing for members of the European Parliament to amend Stop Killing Games into the Digital Fairness Act instead. "We can move on without the Commission and their non-decision," the group said, referencing earlier comments from Accursed Farms creator Ross Scott.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Het kabinet werkt aan een uitgebreid stikstofpakket dat Nederland na jaren weer ‘van het slot’ moet halen. Het moet buitengewoon omzichtig opereren, want er moet steun worden gezocht in Den Haag en bij provincies én de regering wil nieuwe boerenprotesten voorkomen. Wie goed kijkt, ziet dat onvrede onder boeren al smeult.

Bij de VPRO vielen deze week tientallen ontslagen als gevolg van bezuinigingen. Het gevolg: minder vrijheid, minder creativiteit. De absurde programma's van Wim T. Schippers waren vroeger ongehoord, en zijn nu letterlijk ongehoord.

British retirees Jane and Alan Kelvey say they do not want incident in Channel to stop them enjoying their sailing trip

• UK politics live – latest updates

A British woman on a yacht in the Channel near which a Russian warship fired warning shots has told how she does not want the incident to be blown out of proportion, saying: “We don’t want world war three to start because of this.”

Jane Kelvey, 69, and her husband, Alan, 70, were on their yacht, Bright Future, travelling from the south coast of England towards France on Tuesday when they came into close contact with the Admiral Grigorovich, a 409ft Russian frigate.

Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Continue reading...

Drive to sell to wealthy Americans is part of pivot away from all-electric strategy

Jaguar Land Rover has U-turned on plans to shift one of its factories to making only electric cars as part of an effort to focus on growth in the US, as Britain’s largest carmaker further rowed back on the transition away from fossil fuels.

The manufacturer told investors on Wednesday it would offer petrol and hybrid versions of new models, including smaller SUVs that had been planned to shift to all-electric sales.

Continue reading...

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!

The GWC has barely had time to unpack its suitcase and already the goals are flying in like overenthusiastic airline baggage. Stadiums are full, scoreboards are busy and, most importantly, football’s three marquee attractions decided that now would be a good time to remind everyone why they dominate highlight reels, sponsorship campaigns and social media algorithms.

First we have Football Daily on the weekend, and now we have Tuuka Tomperi stating in yesterday’s letters: ‘Football Daily is the best newsletter in the world, by far!’ The first I can pass off as GWC Fever, but the second is inexplicable and means I will be visiting my general practitioner as soon as the group stage is over” – Alex Bull.

Before kick-off on Sunday I was pessimistic about having to slog through three Curaçao matches in the GWC. But, after seeing them torn apart by Germany, 7-1, I can safely say that it’s just like watching Brazil. 2014-era Brazil, but still” – R Reisman.

You could argue that Vozinha is actually better than Pat Jennings (yesterday’s Football Daily). Vozinha’s given first name is Josimar, after the Brazilian defender who was a star of Mexico ‘86. That Josimar not only played in the game against Northern Ireland (and Jennings) that you referenced, he scored the second Brazilian goal, with a shot from way out on the right touchline if I remember correctly. Surely that’s conclusive proof that a Josimar is better than a Jennings?” – Richard O’Hagan.

The late music legend Cesaria Évora had a voice that reached the ends of the earth. She was from the same town in Cape Verde as the goalkeeper Vozinha, whose nickname is Portuguese for ‘little voice’. That little voice produced a massive roar heard around the world” – Peter Oh.

I wanted to add my Roy Hattersley recollection (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). His column was my favourite part of the Guardian, bar none. The man wrote exquisitely, so I was delighted to bump into him at Priestfield before a Gillingham v Sheffield Wednesday game about 25 years ago. He was polite and charming for our brief chat and responded with ‘I hope not’ when I bid him adieu, having said ‘may the better team win’. Wednesday duly lost to my beloved Gills. RIP Roy” – Martin Griffiths.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Continue reading...

Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought- and flood-prevention measures

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.

Continue reading...

Cisco has updated a February security advisory, adding another product to the list of those affected by the maximum-severity CVE-2026-20127. Switchzilla made a small amendment to the original advisory on Tuesday evening, noting that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Validator, formerly vBond, was also among the boxes attackers could pop open. Readers may remember the fuss over CVE-2026-20127 (10.0) a few months ago. The make-me-admin improper authentication flaw prompted a Five Eyes alert since attackers could essentially gain persistent root access to all vulnerable instances. In other words, it's a far-from-ideal situation that could could create espionage opportunities, given the prevalence of Cisco's SD-WAN offerings in Western networks. Cisco said at the time that attackers could exploit CVE-2026-20127 to gain admin rights, access NETCONF, and reconfigure the SD-WAN fabric, before exploiting CVE-2022-20775 (7.8), a path traversal flaw discovered in September 2022, to gain root access. Cisco Talos, the company's threat intel arm, posited that the bug could have been exploited for as long as three years by the time it was discovered. Talos attributed the exploitation activity to a group it tracks as UAT-8616, whose activity dates back to at least 2023, according to its researchers' estimates. No one has formally attributed UAT-8616 to a specific country or group of individuals, but experts say that it is a highly sophisticated outfit that has a history of targeting critical infrastructure sectors. Ollie Whitehouse, NCSC-UK's CTO, said at the time: "Our new alert makes clear that organizations using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN products should urgently investigate their exposure to network compromise and hunt for malicious activity, making use of the new threat hunting advice produced with our international partners to identify evidence of compromise. "UK organizations are strongly advised to report compromises to the NCSC, and to apply vendor updates and hardening guidance as soon as practicable to reduce the risk of exploitation." The Register asked Cisco for more information, but it did not immediately respond. Customers should not have to make any new changes, provided that they upgraded their software to a fixed version across all systems when the advisory was first published in February, not just SD-WAN Controller and SD-WAN Manager. The update comes weeks after Cisco disclosed another zero-day affecting Catalyst SD-WAN, suggesting that it had been exploited for at least a week at the time. Tracked as CVE-2026-20245, it marked the sixth SD-WAN flaw disclosed this year, and the second to be exploited as a zero-day in as many months. ®

The Homebrew team has released version 6.0 of this popular open-source package manager for macOS and Linux, with a new mechanism for trusting packages and support for sandboxing on Linux, to align with existing sandboxing on macOS. Homebrew 6.0 introduces tap trust, a "tap" being a collection of formulae, casks (a package of pre-compiled binaries) and commands which usually reside in a Git repository. The tool trusts official Homebrew taps by default, but requires an explicit agreement before it will trust third-party taps (which can include arbitrary Ruby code) before they install or run any code. Tap trust is part of Homebrew’s approach to supply chain security, which has a number of distinctive features. Package maintainers are Homebrew maintainers, not the authors of the package. Names are maintainer-curated, so typosquats (giving a package a misleading name designed to be similar to one that is popular) can be rejected. Each download is pinned to a sha256 checksum. Package binaries are built from source, which protected Homebrew from incidents like the Trivy compromise earlier this year when official Trivy binaries were replaced with malicious versions. These and other features of Homebrew security are described in the documentation. Project leader Mike McQuaid told us that "Homebrew was less vulnerable 10-15 years ago than npm is today. The trust model is radically different and, even today, we are much quicker to break backwards compatibility in the interest of security." A new security feature is sandboxing on Linux when Homebrew compiles software. This was already implemented on macOS (and has been for a decade). Version 6.0 adds a Linux implementation based on the Bubblewrap project, and this will be on by default for developers. A new Homebrew sub-command, brew vulns, will check installed packages for known vulnerabilities, by checking against the OSV (vulnerability database for open source). The commands brew install and brew upgrade will now show a dependency summary and require a conformation prompt before running, called ask mode, following a developer survey earlier this year where this was highly requested. Another new command, brew exec, will run a Homebrew-provided executable, similar to the way npx works for npm packages. Homebrew startup performance in 6.0 is said to be faster, thanks to parallelised bottle fetching (a bottle is a pre-built package) and other optimizations. Apple is phasing out support for Intel macOS both for future versions of macOS and for Rosetta, the Intel compatibility layer. Homebrew is following: in September this year no new bottles will be built for macOS Intel and from September 2027 macOS Intel will be "unsupported entirely and all related code deleted," according to the post introducing Homebrew 6.0. Homebrew is well-liked by developers, and becoming more popular on Linux as well as macOS. There is some frustration though regarding the dropping of Intel support. "The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!," said one. McQuaid replied noting that Homebrew will still work for a year after support is dropped to "Tier 3”, meaning almost unsupported, and added that "there’s nothing stopping you for doing the work to setup ‘Intelbrew’ and support it for the community." Another issue he mentioned is that GitHub is dropping macOS Intel runners for continuous integration towards the end of 2027. It is notable that Homebrew 6.0 made extensive use of AI coding. A document on responsible AI usage takes the line that AI contributions must be disclosed and human-reviewed, and that AI is not responsible for any code, rather the human contributor is responsible. "AI is great if used responsibly which means a human reviewing all changes both before PRs submitted and a maintainer reviewing before PRs are merged. I have found despite using it responsibly it has been a huge personal accelerator," McQuaid told us. ®

Trump said this week that his administration would “soon” be able to reimpose sanctions on Russian crude “because the oil is now flowing” through the Strait of Hormuz.

Sources told Russian media that Traber, who has reported ties to Vladimir Putin, is suspected of being involved in the murder of a businessman and politician in 2022.

Cars have been one of the recurring themes throughout my illustration career. Whether I'm creating artwork for a luxury car show on the shores of Lake Como or visualising emerging technologies such as hydrogen-powered vehicles and clean energy infrastructure, it's a subject I never tire of exploring. Here is a selection of automotive illustrations from recent years.

We start this week with Joseph’s story about the FCC’s wild proposal to require peoples’ government ID numbers to even get a phone plan. The FCC is doing it to curb robocalls, but also said it would be useful for a bunch of other stuff. After the break, Jason tells us all about cops abusing Flock to stalk girlfriends and other people. In the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel explains how a software update is impacting Amazon drivers.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs⁠
• ⁠Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People⁠
• ⁠Software Update Automatically Turns off Amazon Delivery Drivers’ AC During Dangerous Summer Heat⁠

Proposed UI rule of thumb: “If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, it must make sense.”

Jennifer 真泥佛 * Taiwan (Busy) has added a photo to the pool:

four.horsemen.and.vanhouten has added a photo to the pool:

Bristol-based artist Diana Beltrán Herrera continues to construct elaborate sculptures of flora and fauna in vibrant paper. Over the last few years, Herrera’s work has grown in both scale and subject matter as she incorporates new materials such as paperboard, thread, and cardboard, which have allowed her work to evolve beyond previous forms.

The artist’s latest explorations of nature motifs include flower structures, leaf patterns, and most recently, coral formations. Uniquely, coral reefs exhibit fractal and hyperbolic geometry, making them a particularly fascinating subject for sculptural reproduction. Utilizing thread as a structural tool has been especially integral for Herrera’s explorations of different species, as she creates dozens of iterations with an array of colorful tentacles and skeletons.

“When working with embroidery, I am particularly interested in how paper can borrow techniques traditionally associated with textiles,” the artist shares with Colossal. “Thread becomes a way of drawing, connecting, and constructing forms.”

Aside from her personal practice, Herrera also continues to produce commissioned works for clients around the world. This month, the artist is sending her first family of coral research works to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where they will be exhibited in an installation opening at the end of June. Find more from the artist on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Diana Beltrán Herrera’s Embroidered Paper Sculptures Mimic Plants and Wildlife appeared first on Colossal.