Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

If you want accurate information about life-changing government services, a potentially hallucinating chatbot might not be your first choice. However, the Trump administration is rolling out a new digital portal for access to federal government tasks that puts AI front and center, even though there are concerns that existing federal digital services may be in danger. Trump announced the launch of America.gov in an executive order on Tuesday, describing the new site as a “unified digital front door to the Federal Government for every individual in the US seeking Federal information or services.” As to what that front door will look like, the key thing to pay attention to in the EO is that the site is a place to “communicate in plain language” and ostensibly “receive accurate answers,” and we all know what that means: It’s an AI chatbot. Google confirmed as much in its own announcement that it was a technology partner in the America.gov initiative, "leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease.” A White House spokesperson told The Register that xAI’s Grok is the other tech partner on the initiative, so watch out for vulgar responses when you ask a simple question. “Advances in technology now make possible a fundamentally different relationship between the people and the Federal Government,” Trump’s EO read in part. It says individuals will be able to “where authorized and technically available, complete Government transactions without being required to navigate the websites of multiple agencies.” Navigate to the site right now and you’re met with a messy site that the National Design Studio, which claims responsibility for its layout, ought to be ashamed of. A paragraph summarizing the purpose of the site is interspersed with graphics that serve no purpose and only interfere with the flow of the text, including one mimicking the fingerprint icon from iOS that actually overlaps with the words before and after it. Scroll down to see some of the tasks that the site claims it will be able to handle, like comparing medication costs, updating your legal name across multiple agencies, or submitting a passport application, and clicking on every single one of them only shows that the feature is coming sometime in 2027. The White House tells us that the embedded chatbots can provide complete answers culled from the 29,000 government websites that were ingested for the platform, but all those additional features will be coming over time. What you have now on America.gov, then, is just a federal government chatbot powered by Gemini and Grok that refers users to other websites - helpful, but not exactly the central portal Trump promised in his EO. The Office of Management and Budget has 90 days to tell agencies how they're supposed to implement their integration with America.gov, meaning it could be a while before the site is as useful as the administration promises, if it ever is at all. In the meantime, it gives Google and xAI a rather high-profile proving ground for their chatbots, courtesy of the federal government. America.gov’s privacy policy claims that the project’s tech partners are operating under zero data retention agreements, so user prompts and responses aren’t retained, sold, turned into advertising profiles, or used to train their AIs. The White House further asserted to us that no user messages are transmitted to Gemini or Grok, though the privacy policy also mentions that America.gov’s AI providers may be sent approximate area information to make results more relevant, which seems to contradict the White House’s claim. Digital service reliability in doubt The idea that the Trump administration would put access to the federal government behind AI chatbots isn’t surprising given how readily the White House has embraced AI since Trump returned to office. A recent coup at the team overseeing the US Web Design System, which maintains design standards and provides components that help government websites from the federal all the way down to the local level meet accessibility requirements, has furthered the AI push as well. As reported last week by FedScoop, the decade-old USWDS was recently purged of its leadership, putting a self-described AI engineer from the Treasury Department in charge of the system. The new USWDS chief, Ryan Parker, said that he plans to automate as much accessibility testing as possible across the system. The state of the system has led a group of current and former government web design leaders and contributors to the open-source USWDS to sound the alarm in an open letter to the General Services Administration that, coincidentally or not, was published, again by FedScoop, not long before the America.gov announcement. With the Trump administration seemingly set on placing as many government services as it can within reach of an AI chatbot that could make critical mistakes, open and accessible web services available elsewhere from the government remain essential. If the open letter's concerns prove well founded, those services could become less reliable, but hey - at least you’ll be able to chat to Grok about it on America.gov without any way to actually solve your problem until sometime in 2027. ®

The FBI’s cyber chief has a message for the criminals that hacked the bureau’s jobs portal last week: "We know how to find you," so turn yourself in. In a video message following the Dutch National Police’s arrest of a 24-year-old whom the FBI described as “one of the alleged leaders of ShinyHunters,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, had some advice for the “remaining members” of the data theft and extortion gang. “We're confident you've seen or heard things in recent days that the public has not,” Leatherman said. “Other groups believed anonymity or their friends would protect them, and they were wrong. Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who's left. The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you. You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out first while the choice is still yours.” The FBI declined to answer The Register’s questions about the video message, including whether it had seized any of the cybercrime group’s infrastructure, and whether any of ShinyHunters’ members had taken Leatherman up on his offer to “reach out first.” After the Dutch suspect’s arrest, police said on Tuesday that they uncovered “a large amount of information” on the man’s laptop, “including details about two murders that were to be committed abroad. There are indications that the suspect gave the order for this.” According to FBI Director Kash Patel, the feds assisted Dutch investigators in cuffing the 24-year-old suspect. In a subsequent xeet, the bureau said that cops seized electronic devices and are investigating additional leads: “More arrests possible.” Early last week, ShinyHunters hacked the FBIJobs.gov portal and claimed to steal sensitive personal details about current, former, and prospective FBI employees. But unlike the group’s typical theft-and-extortion intrusions, a spokesperson told The Register that this one was “NOT financially motivated … We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements they made, which included substantial false allegations.” Later, in an exclusive interview, the spokesperson told us the attention-grabbing hack would preserve ShinyHunters’ reputation and keep its “business” afloat. “It’s a game and it’s the world we live in,” a ShinyHunters spokesperson said. “We are just protecting our business as any other business would do. It’s about who does their job better.”®

Meta continued its search for profits at the bottom of the AI rabbit hole on Monday when CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation of an enterprise services business built on the back of its Muse models and agent harnesses. Meta uses its social networking and messaging services to gather data about users so it can use AI-powered recommender systems to present targeted ads, a service its advertiser customers find valuable. The company's online businesses (excluding virtual reality) earned $50.3 billion in profits in the first half of 2026, essentially all from advertising, and its ad revenue amounted to $114.4 billion during the same period. The company has edged toward having LLMs write those ads and also imagines AI managing some aspects of advertisers' businesses – such as responding to customer inquiries. With the new Meta Enterprise Platform, the company is now trying to capitalize on more than the fact businesses can't help but to have a presence on its social media properties. In addition to companion agents, Zuckerberg sees opportunities to sell business and coding agents, and even power customer applications through its API platform. This puts Meta in a position not only to compete with other model builders but the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google – all of which have a head start in bringing AI-powered services to enterprise customers. "Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack, including the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers to help them grow," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. Leading the company's enterprise push is Chirantan "CJ" Desai, who on Monday quit as CEO of MongoDB to take the Meta gig. Desai gets the job of convincing enterprises to embrace Meta, an idea that flopped in 2016 when the company introduced Facebook At Work, a version of its social networks tuned for internal collaboration. While Meta's AI rivals – Microsoft, Amazon, and Google – have all endured various scandals, they are established B2B players and have rap sheets rather shorter than Meta's. The Social Network recently agreed to an $18 billion settlement over allegations it employed additive features that negatively affected children's health. That's just the tip of an iceberg filled with everything from perve glasses to age-inappropriate chatbots and of course the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But like a kid in a suit, Zuckerberg now wants you to believe he's really grown up and you can totally trust Meta for all your AI needs. ®

When a critical application fails, the last thing an IT team needs is a debate over who's responsible. Yet in complex enterprise environments, network, application, and compute teams often rely on separate legacy monitoring tools, each providing only part of the picture. Identifying the root cause can become a time-consuming exercise while essential services remain unavailable. As organizations expand their use of AI, hybrid infrastructure, and sovereign cloud environments, the challenge is becoming more pressing. The systems supporting critical services are growing more interconnected, while the need for resilience, operational efficiency, and effective governance continues to increase. AI agents are starting to take on some of that operational load, but an agent reasoning from legacy monitoring data sees the same partial picture the humans do. But are enterprise leaders seeing the same risks as the teams responsible for keeping these systems running? Research by Virtana suggests a significant observability gap between what boardrooms believe they know about their IT environments and what frontline operators experience. In this interview, The Register's Tim Phillips speaks with Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, about the limitations of legacy monitoring approaches and how agentic observability could help organizations gain a clearer picture of their infrastructure. Appleby explores why fragmented legacy monitoring can leave IT teams struggling to distinguish the cause of an incident from its symptoms, and how agentic observability, which correlates real-time telemetry across applications, cloud, infrastructure, networks, and AI systems, gives AI agents the context to accelerate root cause analysis and remediation. The discussion also examines the growing importance of observability for data sovereignty and AI infrastructure. As enterprises invest in AI factories and increasingly complex workloads, Appleby considers how organizations can maintain visibility across the technology stack, strengthen governance, and address operational risks before they disrupt critical services. For IT leaders, the interview offers a perspective on moving beyond the traditional focus on proving which team wasn't responsible, toward faster resolution, preventative observability, and more resilient operations. It also raises an important question for executive teams: Is investment in governance and operational controls keeping pace with the infrastructure and AI services their businesses increasingly depend on? Watch the full interview below to explore how agentic observability can help enterprises can close the observability gap and strengthen their approach to IT resilience. Contributed by Virtana

In a big serving of bad news, there are crumbs of comfort.

Maandag zijn vijf Britten op borgtocht vrijgelaten. Zij zouden zich zondag verdacht hebben gedragen nabij de militaire basis. De busjes waarin ze reden zijn „grondig onderzocht”.

Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri, nu burgemeester van Marrakech, is aangewezen als de nieuwe premier van Marokko. Zij zal een kabinet vormen in een tijd van grote politieke onvrede, na de grootschalige jongerenprotesten en de bestorming van Ceuta.

Dylan

akiirudizu has added a photo to the pool:

Google says ChromeOS will keep receiving regular updates and security patches through mid-2034, after which qualifying newer Chromebooks will be able to migrate to the new Googlebook OS. 9to5Google reports: Starting with Chromebook updates, Google says that "Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime," with all Enterprise and Education management capabilities remaining in place as well: "We will maintain support for current Chromebook devices running ChromeOS as outlined in our Auto Update policy and the Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime..."

Google adds that similar management tools will be coming to Googlebook, but they're not available yet. Apparently they're planned for the second half of 2027. Meanwhile, Google says that "many" existing Chromebook models will be eligible to transition from ChromeOS to Googlebook OS. More details are coming "soon." A later note specifies that Google is referring to "newer commercial Chromebook models."

Notably, Google specifies a year when ChromeOS updates will come to an end in a later note -- 2034. Chromebooks with a 10-year update policy that extends past 2034 will be eligible to move to Googlebook OS. [...] Finally, in regards to apps, Google says that it is "committed" to web developers despite an increased focus on Android apps on Googlebooks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PARIJS (ANP) - Bij demonstraties op scholen in Frankrijk zijn zeker 440 arrestaties verricht, meldt het Franse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken. Eerder op dinsdag stond dat aantal nog op circa veertig. Veel van de arrestanten zijn minderjarig. Het ministerie schat het aantal demonstranten op meer dan 200.000 mensen.

Er heerst onvrede op scholen in Frankrijk, onder meer vanwege een gebrek aan leraren, gebrekkige lesroosters en materialen. Rond Parijs werd daarom sinds afgelopen week geprotesteerd, waarna een scholierenbond opriep tot landelijke protesten op scholen.

Minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Laurent Nunez verklaarde tegen BFMTV dat de diensten secuur hebben opgetreden tegen het geweld en de vernielingen die daarmee gepaard gingen. De politie zou "extreem proportioneel" hebben gehandeld.

De burgemeester van de Noord-Parijse gemeente Saint-Denis noemde het geweld eerder op dinsdag in sommige gevallen geoorloofd. Nunez noemde die opmerkingen tegenover BFMTV "zeer ernstig" en "onacceptabel".

UTRECHT (ANP) - De Nederlandse milieuorganisatie Both ENDS dient in Brussel een klacht in tegen Nieuw-Zeeland, omdat het land klimaatafspraken uit een twee jaar oude handelsovereenkomst met de Europese Unie niet zou nakomen. De Nieuw-Zeelandse regering hief vorig jaar een verbod op de zoektocht naar nieuwe olie- en gasvelden op zee op. Ook voerde ze onlangs wetgeving in die een lopende klimaatzaak tegen een zuivelconcern onmogelijk maakte.

Both ENDS vindt dat daarmee de afspraak geschonden wordt dat de EU en Nieuw-Zeeland milieuwetgeving niet zullen afzwakken om investeringen en handel aan te moedigen. Ook zou Nieuw-Zeeland de belofte om zich te houden aan het klimaatakkoord van Parijs niet langer nakomen.

De milieuorganisatie heeft de klacht ingediend bij een meldpunt waar mensen de Europese Commissie kunnen verzoeken om naleving van handelsafspraken af te dwingen. Zij krijgt daarbij steun van Nieuw-Zeelandse milieuorganisaties Greenpeace Aotearoa en Environmental Law Initiative.

Zo’n driekwart van de Nederlanders had in 2025 te veel PFAS in het bloed. Dat meldt het RIVM. In Dordrecht waren de waarden bijna het slechtst van het hele land. Alleen rond de industrie in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen was het nog extremer.

Soon, Jon Adams

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.

GOP senators lash out on Smith, who led criminal cases against Trump, with invective and inaccurate information

Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led two criminal cases against Donald Trump in 2023, faced attacks from Republicans in a wide-ranging hearing on Tuesday that included a basketball mix-up, a reference to the tooth fairy and accusations of perjury.

In the Senate judiciary committee hearing on Tuesday, the Republican senator Eric Schmitt, of Missouri, raised perjury allegations against Smith, seemingly over a mix-up about the Atlanta Hawks and University of Iowa Hawkeyes basketball teams.

Continue reading...

• Aleksander Ceferin condemns FFE and Balogun affair

• Tells club chiefs it is ‘time to say enough’ to Fifa

The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has attacked his embattled Fifa counterpart Gianni Infantino in a scathing takedown of the failed Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) project and other recent scandals, saying “the emperor is naked” and declaring “it is time to say ‘enough’”.

In a pointed address to the European Football Clubs (EFC) general assembly, Ceferin did not mention Infantino by name but made clear his view that Fifa’s leadership must change. He drew on the event’s location, Copenhagen, to make a comparison to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes in assessing Infantino’s conduct, making clear reference to the peace prize awarded to Donald Trump and last summer’s Folarin Balogun affair along with the FFE scheme.

Continue reading...

Texts, including unnamed male defendant appearing to apologize, reportedly sent days after alleged 2024 assault

Excerpts of text messages reportedly exchanged by a defendant in the Cornell University gang-rape case and the woman who claims she was assaulted were published by CBS News on Tuesday, a day after New York prosecutors said they were reopening a criminal investigation.

The texts were reportedly sent within days of the alleged October 2024 assault at a campus fraternity house in which a female student said she was drugged and repeatedly raped over the course of seven hours by multiple men who were alerted to her presence on the social media platform Snapchat.

Continue reading...