Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Reijnen chase is sign Reds manager will stay as Moyes admits being despondent over a poor end to season
Continue reading...Emerald Fennell says period-realistic scene emphasising Cathy’s lack of razors was shot but did not make final cut
The Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell said it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing Margot Robbie’s hairy armpits did not make the final cut, because women in period adaptations are often shown with clean-shaven underarms.
Robbie’s character, Cathy, had “extremely hairy armpits” in the 2026 adaptation of the novel, but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”, said the director.
Continue reading...Montpellier 59-26 Ulster
Dominant French side run in nine tries
Ulster’s dreams of claiming a first trophy for 20 years were summarily dashed by a strong Montpellier on a steamy night in Bilbao. Led by a revitalised Billy Vunipola the French side possessed too much power for their opponents and were duly rewarded with their third Challenge Cup triumph in 11 seasons.
Vunipola, who last featured for England at the 2023 World Cup, was at the forefront of an increasingly dominant forward effort which steadily wore Ulster down in energy-sapping conditions. The wing Donovan Taofifénua collected two of his side’s nine tries as Montpellier, currently second in the Top 14 table, claimed the latest trophy of this distinctly French-dominated season.
Continue reading...Barcelona’s former coach Jonatan Giráldez can bring insider knowledge to a fourth final between the European giants
You could be forgiven for having a sense of deja vu before a fourth Champions League final between the Spanish champions, Barcelona, and French title-winners, OL Lyonnes, on Saturday evening.
The three-time champions and eight-time champions played each other in the final of Europe’s premier competition three times in six years between 2019 and 2024, with Lyonnes earning a 4-1 win over the Catalan giants in 2019 and a 3-1 win in 2022, before Barcelona delivered a 2-0 defeat of the French side in 2024.
Continue reading..."Speedway"
linocut print by Sybil Andrews, 1934
#motorcycles #motorsport #linocut #printmaking #1930s #sybilandrews #modernism #modernart #UK
A solo Russian-speaking threat actor used a jailbroken Google Gemini in a fraud and credential-theft campaign targeting hardcore Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists. Between September 2025 and May 2026, the “low-skilled” scumbag using the handle bandcampro partnered with the LLM to impersonate an American veteran, run a Telegram channel (@americanpatriotus), hack admin credentials, and steal cryptocurrency, according to a threat report from TrendAI. His only "real cost" in the operation was stolen API keys. Bandcampro ultimately reached about 17,000 subscribers, used 73 likely-stolen Gemini API keys, hacked 29 WordPress admin credentials, infiltrated at least one company, and emptied at least one victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, according to TrendAI researchers Philippe Lin, Joseph C Chen, Fyodor Yarochkin, and Vladimir Kropotov. The threat-hunters detailed the campaign in a Thursday report, and said while the Telegram channel dates back five years, bandcampro’s success skyrocketed once he started using AI-generated content last fall. "We have reached an inflection point for cybercrime conspiracies,” Tom Kellermann, TrendAI’s VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register, adding that “bandcampro's conspiracy underscores the sophistication of the Russian cybercriminal community and how weaponized jailbroken LLMs are manipulated to orchestrate a systemic cybercrime campaign.” Kellermann said the attack “highlights LLMs' Achilles heel, which is the tremendous exposure to API attacks." TrendAI researchers discovered the scammer’s infrastructure in May, which exposed the full contents of the individual’s operational environment. He used Google Gemini to generate the Telegram channel text and Venice.ai to power an interactive chatbot designed to simulate a Quantum Financial System (QFS) terminal. Neither Google nor Venice responded to The Register’s requests for comment. The campaign targeted the QAnon and MAGA communities, mimicking the cryptic, anonymous “Q drop” messages at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy, but the researchers say his “use of information operation techniques was more likely for cryptocurrency fraud instead of political motives,” based on the content posted, and the stock remote access trojan (RAT) used alongside other commercial malware. On September 9, 2025, the actor posted a fake "freedom-first, self-custody wallet" called StellarMonster, with a welcome bonus of up to 1,000 XLM (about $380) on the Telegram channel. It was an executable named StellarMonSetup.exe. Malware analysis determined that in reality, StellarMonSetup.exe is a legitimate remote access tool called GoToResolve, which gives the operator a persistent remote desktop session with file access, command execution, and clipboard capture. Plus, any subscribers who used the "import your wallet" function and typed their seed phrase into the fake import screen gave the attacker their wallet keys. “At least one victim's crypto-wallet was fully compromised: password cracked, 12-word mnemonic stolen, and the owner's 40+ wallet addresses harvested across all major chains,” the researchers noted. The attacker also used an AI-powered brute-forcing tool to hack WordPress accounts, we’re told. “The script is built on the premise that people mutate familiar base passwords in predictable ways, and Gemini 2.5 Flash can model the mutations when supplied with static wordlists,” Trend wrote. In total, the AI-assisted WordPress hacking operation cracked 29 WordPress administrator accounts, including those belonging to weapons retailers, legal offices, medical practices, and small commercial sites. During his conversations with Gemini, bandcampro asked questions like: “When the bot accumulates 5,000 active users, how much can we earn from one pump-and-dump cycle?” The criminal also asked how professional crypto call centers scam North American victims and Gemini suggested Medicare and/or Health Canada fraud targeting the elderly. The Russian speaker also automated his content campaign through a pipeline he named "Quantum Patriot," a set of Python scripts that called Gemini to role-play as an American veteran patriot. The pipeline fed a preset list of newsfeeds into the LLM and Gemini rewrote them, prompted to act as an admin of an “American Patriot” channel looking for “hidden angles.” The crypto- and credential-thief also used Gemini to help him hack, set up a command-and-control framework - including a mail-testing tool, a Gmail aggregator, and an anonymous proxy on a VM in the Netherlands - steal and validate credentials, and run the chatbot. “In the anatomy of one busy working day, Gemini deployed servers, helped debug code, automated workflows, wrote a script to rotate API keys, and managed the actor’s Cloudflare tunnels,” the TrendAI researchers wrote. “The actor prompted in Russian, while the LLM reasoned and replied in English. Over one 16-hour session, the actor co-worked with Gemini end-to-end." At one point, after a nine-hour pause from the human partner, which the authors say “was likely a 9-hour sleep,” bandcampro found the bot posting every 20 minutes without a break - but with Russian slang appearing in the English posts. So he opened another session to fix it. “What previously required a team of writers, social media managers, IT workers, and malware programmers can now be automated by a single actor using a VPS, a Telegram bot, and API access to frontier models,” Trend’s team warned. ®
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears so determined to win the AI race that he is willing to sacrifice some employee privacy to make it happen. In a leaked audio recording published by the worker advocacy group More Perfect Union, Zuckerberg purportedly answered an employee's question about "device monitoring" with a six-minute monologue in which he said Meta employees are very smart and to win the most competitive technology race in history, he would need to collect their keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots to make its own AI measure up to its rivals. “We are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks. I think that this is going to be a very big advantage if we can do it,” Zuckerberg purportedly said during an April 30 meeting in which an employee asked about the "top of mind" issue. Meta did not reply to an email from The Register seeking comment and has not confirmed the authenticity of the audio clip, but a company spokesperson confirmed in April that Meta would monitor employees to train AI. Meta's tracking tool is called Model Capability Initiative, according to reports. The audio was posted the same day Meta announced 8,000 job cuts. It captured Zuckerberg's thoughts on the news, first reported by Reuters, that Meta planned to install software on employees' computers to monitor activity for AI training. More Perfect Union did not reply to an email from The Register seeking comment. "So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools that or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think, is going to dramatically increase our models' coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company," he purportedly said in the audio. "So that's one example. Another thing that our system needs to be very good at is using computers, so the way that you get a system to be good at using computers is by having it watch really smart people use computers. So that's basically the essence of what we are trying to do here." In one part of the audio, Zuckerberg said the software would not be used to surveil employees' actions on the job, though he stopped short of saying the data would be anonymized. Rather, he said the purpose was narrowly focused on making its AI work better than competitors. “The content is sort of, you know, stripped out in like as much as is possible,” he purportedly said in the leaked audio. “It's like none of the data has been used for like looking at what people are doing, or surveillance, or performance tracking, or anything like that.” That aligns with what a Meta spokesperson told Reuters: that MCI data would not be used for performance assessments. European employees are reportedly exempt from the program because the EU's General Data Protection Regulation likely prohibits this type of monitoring without explicit consent, according to multiple reports. Meta is not the only major technology company turning to its own workforce for AI training data. The Information reported this week that Microsoft and xAI are also leveraging internal employees to generate and refine training datasets. In a similar vein to what Zuckerberg purportedly said, Microsoft, which employs thousands of software engineers, reportedly views its workforce as a competitive advantage for improving GitHub Copilot. In the recording, Zuckerberg purportedly said Meta settled on using its own employees over contractors because they were smarter. “One basic insight and hypothesis that we have is that a lot of data generation across the field is done by these like contract companies,” Zuckerberg purportedly said. “(B)ut in general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks if you're working through these contractors.” However, the contractor pipeline is also being watched. In January 2026, Wired reported that OpenAI's data vendor, Handshake AI, began asking freelance contractors to upload real work products from past and current jobs, including contracts, financial models, presentations, and code repositories. OpenAI provided a tool to help contractors strip confidential information before uploading, but intellectual property lawyers warned the approach carries significant legal risk. Zuckerberg said this sort of surveillance and the difficult conversations around it are the cost of competing at the frontier of AI. "How do we navigate running the company through what is just this incredibly dynamic period?" he said. "There's lots of things that people would like more certainty on than we have." ®
The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) needs to regulate squid fishing in the South Pacific.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
📄
This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.
On Monday a man in Grapevine, Texas drove his Tesla Cybertruck into a lake to test the vehicle’s “wade mode.” Police arrested the Cybertruck’s owner, Jimmy Jack McDaniel, after he and his passengers fled the vehicle.
At one point, the owner tried to get back into the vehicle, and law enforcement responded by deploying jet skis and calling a tow truck to pull the Cybertruck from the water, according to hours of related footage 404 Media obtained. The passengers were German tourists, according to a conversation included in the bodycam footage.
“The charge port is underwater and it [the Cybertruck] thinks it’s plugged in to the charging unit and it won’t let the wheels turn because it thinks it’s charging. And as soon as I can get it a little bit closer to the ground I can drive it out,” McDaniel said during a conversation with a police officer.
0:00
/0:59
A cut of the footage obtained by 404 Media. Image: 404 Media.
“Well the wrecker company’s going to tow it out,” the officer said.
McDaniel then explained this was the third time he’d gotten the Cybertruck stuck in water. “The third time you’ve done this?” the officer asked.
“Yes,” McDaniel said.
“Why?” the police asked.The start of McDaniel’s answer is lost as wind blows across the bodycam’s mic. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, then insisted he could drive it once it was out of the water.
404 Media obtained the footage from the Grapevine Police Department through a public records request. Officials from the local fire department are also visible in the footage.
“The vehicle became disabled and took on water. The driver and passengers abandoned the vehicle and the Grapevine Fire Department Water Rescue Team assisted in removing it from the lake. The driver was arrested on charges of Operation of Vehicle in [a] Closed Section of Park/Lake and numerous water safety equipment violations,” the Grapevine Police Department said in a statement published earlier in the week.
According to Tesla’s website, Wade Mode is designed to allow the Cybertruck to “enter and drive through bodies of water, such as rivers or creeks. It is your responsibility to gauge the depth of any body of water before entering. Damage or water ingress to Cybertruck as a result of driving in water is not covered by the warranty.” The maximum depth a Cybertruck can navigate is a little more than 2 and a half feet, according to the website. Grapevine Lake, where the incident took place, has segments that go down 65 feet deep.
The Grapevine Lake incident is just the latest in a series of high profile mishaps involving the Cybertruck. Last summer, a Cybertruck in self-driving mode crashed on an highway overpass near Austin, Texas. In 2024, a Cybetruck got stuck attempting to ford a river in California and had to be pulled out by a Chevy Silverado.
Before they arrested McDaniel, officers explained all the licenses and equipment he needed to legally take a craft into the water. “I wasn’t thinking about that,” he said. “Obviously I wasn’t thinking at all.”
Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called "Hell Grind" that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup's AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI filmmaking: thousands of detailed prompts, endless iteration, high costs, and plenty of traditional filmmaking judgment were still required. The Wall Street Journal reports: What might surprise viewers is how much technical film know-how was needed to create the movie, said Adil Alimzhanov, a content lead at Higgsfield who also worked on it. "You have to understand camera composition, which shots are changed. Like you can't have two close-ups back to back, you have to start with an establishing shot," he said. "You still need those filmmaking skills." Higgsfield, which was valued at $1.3 billion in its latest funding round earlier this year, crossed $400 million in annual revenue run rate in May. It doesn't make the actual video-generation models, relying instead on existing tools like Google's Veo 3. But it does provide the tooling on top to make sure that the visuals are consistent across all the incoming generations.
The core of the movie-making process here was prompting the AI models and getting clips back, Alimzhanov said. Each prompt would generate about 15 seconds of footage. Those 15 seconds needed to be generated a number of times, with tweaks to the prompt to get the best possible version. The first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots. One of the biggest difficulties in making longer-form films with AI is maintaining consistency across the outputs. AI models can be unpredictable, and a feature-length film can't have scenes that look completely different from one moment to the next.
Because of that, every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, "contre-jour" backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on ("cine lens," 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as "slop," said Alimzhanov. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: "gravity and inertia respected -- mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props." The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.
One aspect of what Higgsfield has built, and sells to clients, is an AI tool that generates these complex, detailed prompts. Users can enter a page from the original script, and the Higgsfield tool will return with a prompt that could be thousands of words long, designed to create production-quality outputs. And all that prompting is how the company racked up a $400,000 AI compute bill on the project. Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov, however, noted that working with "cloud" providers, like Nebius and CoreWeave, rather than big hyperscalers, helped it keep costs from going even higher. You can watch the trailer for Hell Grind on YouTube and judge the results for yourself.
The core of the movie-making process here was prompting the AI models and getting clips back, Alimzhanov said. Each prompt would generate about 15 seconds of footage. Those 15 seconds needed to be generated a number of times, with tweaks to the prompt to get the best possible version. The first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots. One of the biggest difficulties in making longer-form films with AI is maintaining consistency across the outputs. AI models can be unpredictable, and a feature-length film can't have scenes that look completely different from one moment to the next.
Because of that, every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, "contre-jour" backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on ("cine lens," 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as "slop," said Alimzhanov. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: "gravity and inertia respected -- mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props." The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.
One aspect of what Higgsfield has built, and sells to clients, is an AI tool that generates these complex, detailed prompts. Users can enter a page from the original script, and the Higgsfield tool will return with a prompt that could be thousands of words long, designed to create production-quality outputs. And all that prompting is how the company racked up a $400,000 AI compute bill on the project. Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov, however, noted that working with "cloud" providers, like Nebius and CoreWeave, rather than big hyperscalers, helped it keep costs from going even higher. You can watch the trailer for Hell Grind on YouTube and judge the results for yourself.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NEW YORK (ANP) - De Amerikaanse aandelenbeurzen zijn vrijdag met winsten het weekend ingegaan. Hoop op een akkoord tussen de VS en Iran, dat een fragiel staakt-het-vuren kan omzetten in blijvende vrede, wakkerde volgens analisten het optimisme op Wall Street aan.
De S&P 500-index tekende een dagwinst op van 0,4 procent tot 7473,47 punten. Het is tevens de achtste week op rij dat de graadmeter een weekwinst neerzet, wat de langste winstreeks is sinds 2023. De Dow-Jonesindex won daarnaast 0,6 procent tot 50.579,70 punten. Techbeurs Nasdaq kreeg er 0,2 procent bij op 26.343,97 punten.
De beurzen wereldwijd gaan al langer omhoog door hoopgevende berichten uit het Midden-Oosten. Maar of de oorlog echt bijna ten einde is, blijft de vraag. Kenners hebben erop gewezen dat beleggers het conflict en de speculatie over een mogelijke vrede ook als koopkans zien. Dat verklaart waarom de beurzen al weken records laten zien, terwijl de wereld kampt met een grote energiecrisis. Beleggers maakten zich vrijdag ook op voor een lang weekend. Maandag zijn de beurzen in New York gesloten om Memorial Day.
Vrijdag werd ook Kevin Warsh ingezworen als het nieuwe hoofd van de Federal Reserve, de Amerikaanse centrale bank. President Donald Trump benadrukte dat hij wil dat Kevin Warsh onafhankelijk de Fed leidt, terwijl hij probeerde de bezorgdheid van beleggers te bagatelliseren dat hij de nieuwe centralebankpresident onder druk zou zetten over beleidsbeslissingen. Trump heeft de Fed eerder vaak bekritiseerd, omdat hij vond dat de centrale bank de rente niet snel genoeg verlaagde.
Of Warsh Trump zijn zin gaat geven, valt op korte termijn te bezien. De nieuwe Fed-voorzitter verklaarde vrijdag dat de Fed onder zijn leiding een "hervormingsgezinde" agenda zal nastreven. Vooralsnog lijkt Wall Street voor dit jaar echter een renteverhoging in te prijzen, omdat de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten de inflatie aanwakkert.
Uber Technologies was vrijdag een duidelijke verliezer op de beurs. Het aandeel zakte dik 2 procent. Persbureau Bloomberg meldde op basis van ingewijden dat de taxi- en maaltijdbezorgapp de mogelijkheden onderzoekt voor een volledige overname van de Duitse maaltijdbezorger Delivery Hero. Uber maakte onlangs bekend dat het zijn belang in Delivery Hero had vergroot tot bijna 20 procent. Volgens Bloomberg kijkt de onderneming samen met adviseurs inmiddels naar manieren om zijn belang verder te vergroten.
F1.com delves into the various upgrades the grid's teams will introduce at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Kimi Antonelli led Mercedes team mate George Russell and Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton in the sole Free Practice ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, as the session was disrupted by three red flags.