UTRECHT (ANP) - Oprichter Ed Bindels van Apple-keten Amac doet een stap terug. Hij is niet langer topman van de Nederlandse verkoper van Apple-producten, maar gaat bij het bedrijf verder als voorzitter van de raad van commissarissen. Volgens Amac was de topfunctie voor Bindels niet meer te combineren met zijn werkzaamheden bij de door hem opgezette horecagelegenheid Liemès en het recent geopende Apple Museum.

Bindels richtte Amac in 2005 op. Het bedrijf groeide uit tot een keten van 47 winkels in Nederland. "De afgelopen twee jaar heb ik mij voornamelijk gefocust op het Apple Museum", stelt Bindels. "Dat is in april succesvol geopend en dat momentum willen we vasthouden. Daarnaast is Liemès onlangs uitgebreid met twee nieuwe eventruimtes en daar gaat ook veel tijd en energie in zitten."

De dagelijkse leiding bij Amac is nu in handen van Roelof de Rijk, die sinds 2013 bij de keten werkt. Hij werd vorig jaar al aangesteld als zogenoemde managing director. Bindels en De Rijk zijn samen eigenaar van de keten.

De gemeente Het Hogeland kreeg een acuut verzoek van asielminister Bart van den Brink. De burgemeester constateert dat „opnieuw Groningse gemeenten solidair” zijn met Ter Apel en ziet elders in het land „onvoldoende steun”.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has again intervened in the affairs of the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), the regional internet registry for 54 nations across Africa and the Indian Ocean. AFRINIC’s home is the island nation of Mauritius, where the Supreme Court recently issued an order [PDF] allowing ICANN to become a party to an application to wind up the registry. AFRINIC has a long history of turmoil, some related to internal corruption. Most of its troubles in the last five years relate to a long and complex dispute with one of its members, a company called Cloud Innovation. The dispute saw AFRINIC placed in receivership. The registry’s receiver eventually ordered fresh elections for AFRINIC. That poll took place in June 2025. After allegations that some proxy votes were cast on behalf of some AFRINIC members without their consent or knowledge, the committee overseeing the poll suspended voting - and later annulled the election. As the peak governance body for unique internet identifiers - domain names and IP addresses - ICANN has oversight of AFRINIC. After the annulment, ICANN intervened with a letter to AFRINIC’s receiver warning that the election could be grounds for it to review whether AFRINIC is compliant with its mandate. Cloud Innovation reacted to ICANN’s letter with an announcement that it would commence legal action aimed at “dissolving AFRINIC as a corporate entity and transitioning its responsibilities to a more trusted framework.” That action is now ongoing. ICANN again stepped in, with a letter [PDF] to the IT Minister of Mauritius that rejects dissolving AFRINIC as an appropriate course of action. The global regulator has now intervened again by successfully applying to become a party to Cloud Innovation’s attempt to dissolve AFRINIC. An ICANN spokesperson explained its decision to seek standing in Cloud Innovation’s attempt to wind up AFRINIC as follows: “Our purpose in seeking to intervene is to ensure that the Court has a proper understanding of AFRINIC’s unique role and of the nature of the resources it administers. We also wish to make clear that the numbering resources allocated through AFRINIC are not assets of AFRINIC, and therefore cannot properly be treated as assets available for distribution in a winding-up.” Amin Dayekh, a Nigeria-based network engineer and internet governance activist, welcomed ICANN’s intervention. “The cavalry has arrived,” he wrote in a recent commentary. “A Regional Internet Registry is not an ordinary company. Its legal personality may be local, but its function is systemic. When such an institution is pulled toward liquidation, receivership, or resource destabilisation, the issue is no longer confined to the parties before the Court. The Court is being asked to look at a local legal vessel carrying a global public function.” Dayekh said ICANN being allowed to participate in this case matters because it will “ensure that the Court sees the registry before it sees only the company. ICANN’s role is to clarify, not command; to protect continuity, not occupy authority; to explain the public coordination function, not politicise the judicial process.” A new front and a takedown order AFRINIC and Cloud Innovation are also tangling in another matter, which started with the May 7th publication of a press release by Larus Limited, a Hong-Kong-based IPv4 leasing company. In the press release, Larus announced the launch of a “First-Party IPv4 Leasing Platform Backed by a Court-Ordered Shareholder-Position Continuity Structure.” Larus’s announcement says Cloud Innovation “operates as the registry-side shareholder-position spine, while Larus serves as the customer-facing first-party IPv4 leasing platform.” Cloud Innovation and Larus share a CEO: entrepreneur and internet governance activist Lu Heng. On May 9th, AFRINIC issued a Communique that states “AFRINIC wishes to make it clear that the Court Order dated 11 June 2025 did not establish, approve, recognise, or create any such ‘Court-Ordered Shareholder-Position Continuity Structure’ in relation to AFRINIC.” A second AFRINIC Communique, issued on On May 15, states that the Supreme Court of Mauritius later issued an interim order that ordered Cloud Innovation and “its affiliates and/or subsidiaries, officers, agents, préposés, representatives, whether directly or indirectly from issuing, publishing, disseminating or causing to be disseminated, any publication, representation or statement which falsely attributes to the Supreme Court of Mauritius, any judicial approval, endorsement or validation of the leasing or commercialisation of AfriNIC-allocated IP resources.” The interim order includes a requirement to take down “any publication, statement or representation suggesting, implying or stating that the Supreme Court of Mauritius has allegedly sanctioned, endorsed, approved or authorised the leasing, monetisation, transfer and/or commercial exploitation of IP address resources allocated by the applicant [AFRINIC].” Cloud Innovation and Larus have both criticized the order, which they say misrepresents the relationship between the two companies, and their activities. “LARUS has never claimed that the Supreme Court of Mauritius approved, endorsed, sanctioned, or authorised any LARUS customer product, IPv4 leasing product, monetisation model, transfer, or commercial contract,” a Larus spokesperson told The Register. Cloud Innovation told us it “has not been formally served with the alleged interim order or underlying papers referred to in AFRINIC’s communiqué. Our first awareness of the matter came from AFRINIC’s public communications and media circulation. We therefore do not accept AFRINIC’s characterisation of the document or the surrounding facts.” “It is not a final judgment. It does not decide whether IPv4 leasing is lawful. It does not decide IP ownership. It does not reverse Cloud Innovation’s register/member position. It does not determine any Larus business model,” the company told us by email. Enter the mysterious NRS Mysterious internet governance lobby group the Number Resource Society (NRS) has also weighed into the matter with a lengthy critique that addresses the same matters Larus and Cloud Innovation touched on in their emails to The Register. That critique also mentions a matter related to AFRINIC’s recent call for community participation in a review of its bylaws. One of the entities considering AFRINIC’s bylaws is the South African Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA). In an email dated May 8, NRS alleged that ISPA has created a draft of new bylaws that “would take away the rights that make you a real AFRINIC member". An ISPA spokesperson shared the response it sent to its own members regarding NRS’s email. It opens: “By now, AFRINIC members should all be aware of the dubious reputation of NRS and know that any communication issued by that organisation is likely to be substantially untethered from facts.” “ISPA does not have a ‘bylaw plan,'” the response to members explains. “ISPA requested that its Mauritian legal team review the current AFRINIC Bylaws and highlight all of the areas where they conflict with Mauritian company law.” The result of that scrutiny was a finding that AFRINIC Resource Members - organizations to which AFRINIC assigned IP addresses and ASNs - are not Registered Members of AFRINIC under Mauritian law. “This dissonance effectively means that many of the rights provided to Resource Members under the Bylaws can be legally challenged in Mauritius,” the ISPA response to members states. “Indeed, a number of the legal cases brought against AFRINIC over the past decade hinge on the fact that the Mauritian Companies Act limits many governance functions to Registered Members.” ISPA’s proposal is to amend AFRINIC bylaws to “make it clear that only the directors of AFRINIC are Registered Members of the organisation, as well as introducing Community Resolutions as a mechanism for ensuring that resource members can still participate in AFRINIC governance. “This is one approach to resolving the problem, and ISPA freely acknowledges that it has both pros and cons.” NRS responded to ISPA’s statement with further criticism and by calling for the formation of a new body to represent AFRINIC members. A hearing on the takedown order will take place on May 28. AFRINIC’s bylaws consultation continues and Cloud Innovation’s application to dissolve the registry continues to make its way through Mauritian courts. And The Register will keep watching. ®

AI algorithms exhibit racial bias in job candidate screening, and they discriminate more frequently against those applying for multiple jobs at different companies, according to Stanford-led researchers. The boffins evaluated algorithmic hiring decisions across multiple employers that use the same hiring vendor. The resulting algorithmic monoculture, they say, is problematic. The vendor in this instance was talent platform pymetrics, acquired by Harver in 2022. Harver did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The researchers – Rishi Bommasani, Sarah H. Bana, Kathleen A. Creel, Dan Jurafsky, and Percy Liang – obtained a pymetrics dataset spanning the period from December 2018 through December 2022. It contained 4,197,168 job applications submitted by 3,372,132 applicants to 1,746 positions. The dataset details hiring recommendations provided to 156 employers with a total annual revenue of $225 billion. It spans 11 industries, including finance, manufacturing, and warehousing. When people applied for jobs at these companies, they were directed to pymetrics' machine learning platform to play assessment games. The platform's algorithm measures gameplay performance and recommends on average 58.2 percent of applicants per position. Employers decide who to interview, typically rejecting candidates who were not recommended by the hiring platform. The researchers contend that the pymetrics algorithm is unfair. "We find substantial evidence of racial disparities in AI-based candidate screening," the researchers said. They made that determination by applying the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s "four-fifths rule," which at least on paper elicits agency attention when a given group's hiring selection rate is less than 80 percent of the most recommended group of job applicants. "We discovered that 26 percent of Black applicants and 15 percent of Asian applicants applied to positions where the AI system discriminated against their racial group," the researchers said. If those Black and Asian candidates had their job applications advanced at the same rate as the most favored group (commonly White applicants), about 40,000 more job candidates would move on to the next screening stage. What's more, the report authors say that when people submit multiple applications at different companies that use the same hiring algorithm, they're more likely to be rejected everywhere than if the companies used different hiring technologies. They found 10 percent of job seekers who submit four applications were rejected from all the places where they applied for jobs. That pattern they say does not show up in hiring studies that look at hiring without regard to the use of AI – there the rejection rate fits what would be expected if every company made its own decisions rather than relying on a single algorithm. The study authors note in their paper [PDF] "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring" that prior work has documented discriminatory patterns when decisions are based on applicant resumes (e.g. when names or activities are more common among certain groups). The game-playing approach used by pymetrics may lack that sort of demographic information, but the researchers say they find adverse impact despite the absence of demographic details and pymetrics' efforts to de-bias applications. They say their findings support prior work showing that AI can have discriminatory effects even in the absence of demographic data because the AI models zero in on variables that are proxies for demographic data (e.g. when a demographic group is overrepresented in a particular zip code or at a particular school). When pymetrics researchers examined the impact of AI for hiring in a 2022 paper, they found that their algorithm would not run afoul of EEOC standards. They argue that fair hiring is complicated and that candidate selection prior to the advent of AI also had problems. "[W]hile it is true that machine learning can introduce harms in the form of systematizing bias and obscuring discrimination, these effects are already pervasive due to widespread use of traditional assessments in many industries," the authors of the pymetrics study said. The Stanford group attributes those results to pymetrics' approach, which involved pooling all its recommendations and considering them in aggregate. The discrimination doesn't show up when it gets averaged out. It's necessary, the authors argue, to consider jobs separately. "For example, imagine the AI tool frequently recommends Black applicants for warehouse jobs but rarely recommends them for finance jobs," they explain. "If we were to average all the jobs together, those two patterns would cancel each other out and it would seem like there is no discrimination. The big-picture average hides the real discrimination happening job by job." ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we've ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs). One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie.

"CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they're sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI," Levie wrote on X. CEOs "play with AI," develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie's examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren't the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren't responsible for training AI models on a company's idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.

In other words, Levie's theory posits, CEOs don't really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can't be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn't stop them from acting on their beliefs. [...] So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years and will become executive chairman, with product chief Ashraf Alkarmi set to take over after a co-CEO transition period. CNBC reports: Drew Houston founded Dropbox
nearly two decades ago at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a company from the Y Combinator incubator program all the way to the public market. Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do something else. [...]

By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of more than $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand.

Dropbox's current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. [...] In its latest quarterly earnings report, Dropbox said it has more than 18 million paying users, and the service remains popular with media professionals, graphic designers, architects, and others who share files and photos as part of their daily work. "Part of me has always thought, oh yeah, I'll be the CEO of Dropbox until my last gasp of my career," he said. "There's never a perfect time, there was no part of me where I was like, 'oh, this date is the date where it's going to happen.'"

Since Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024, the company has "become a lot more responsive to our customers and is taking bigger swings on innovation," Houston said. "I trust the right leader," he said. "The company's in the right place."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In grote getale stonden er woensdagmiddag mensen klaar bij de Rotterdamse amateurclub RVV Blijdorp. Hun blauwe shirts verraadden wie er enkele minuten later zou aankomen met een grote bus: de gehele WK-selectie van Curaçao. De internationals hielden een ‘meet-and-greet’ bij de club en konden daar op veel liefde rekenen: “Het is een echte community.”

Zo’n vijftig inspecteurs controleerden woensdag in het industrie- en havengebied op het vervoer van gevaarlijke stoffen. Dat gebeurde op de weg, op het spoor én op het water. Twee keer per jaar doet de Inspectie Leefomgeving en Transport (ILT) een massale actie. "We zijn beschermers van mens en milieu."

Zo’n vijftig inspecteurs controleerden woensdag in het industrie- en havengebied op het vervoer van gevaarlijke stoffen. Dat gebeurde op de weg, op het spoor én op het water. Twee keer per jaar doet de Inspectie Leefomgeving en Transport (ILT) een massale actie. "We zijn beschermers van mens en milieu."

Chiky&Cheky is the signature character of KOREAN STREET MARKET, inspired by two symbolic elements: the rooster of France and Korean fried chicken ? one of Korea's most beloved foods. Its red, blue, white, and black color system reinterprets both the French flag and the Korean Taegeuk into a bold contemporary identity. Rather than functioning as a mascot, ChikyCheky acts as a playful cultural symbol that naturally appears across packaging, graphics, signage, merchandise, and digital content ? connecting the energy of Seoul with French street culture.

Ontzettend leuk nieuws voor liefhebbers van Danny de Munk, waaronder Danny de Munk: je kunt het eerste tv-interview met Danny de Munk nu terugkijken op het internet, meer specifiek bij Beeld en Geluid, dat een geweldig archief met ruim 700.000 programma's van de publieke omroep online heeft gegooid. Toevalligerwijs in een omgeving die minder irritant en disfunctioneel is dan NPO Start (het kan wel!), dus dat is boffen. Ook interessant voor mensen die, anders dan Danny de Munk, niet als eerste naar zichzelf zoeken (wie doet dat nou?), want er staat dus echt takkeveel op. Alle Ischa's terugkijken, dat ene steevast onvindbare interview waarin Sven Kockelmann het opneemt tegen een piepjonge Baudet, hoogtepunten uit de vaderlandse geschiedenis herbeleven, bergen archiefbeeld van de grote drie, oudejaarsconferences die vroeger leuk waren, en ga zo maar door. Ja weet je, ga vooral zelf lekker grasduinen en verras ons in de reaguursels met opgeduikelde parels.

De Schatkamer gebruiken zoals 'ie bedoeld is

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Waarom?!

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Wat?!

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As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists have discovered 1,121 marine species in a single year”. Discoveries include “a new species of deep-sea ghost shark, a symbiotic bristle worm…as well as corals, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, and anemones”.

Nguyen's case is based on comparing the damage done by pervasive social scoring systems to the innocence of private pursuits. But we have pervasive social scoring systems precisely because passionate private pursuits so often get out of hand. This was Hobbes and Bentham's point. It would be nice to think that we have moved beyond their world, in which self-serving professors, bishops and dukes got to call the shots. But we haven't. From Trivial Pursuits [LRB; ungated]

While this year’s St. Petersburg International Book Fair celebrated pro-war literature, Russia’s publishing industry is under mounting pressure.

Sex offender attended Interlochen camp in Michigan as teenager and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars

A Michigan summer arts camp and boarding school where Jeffrey Epstein has been accused of meeting at least two of his victims will tear down a lodge that once bore his name.

The Interlochen Center for the Arts said this week that its board of trustees has approved a plan to demolish the Green Lake Lodge, which had been known as Jeffrey E Epstein Scholarship Lodge until the school cut ties and scrubbed references to the late millionaire sex offender after his first conviction in 2008.

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Kenneth Iwamasa pleaded guilty over role in Friends actor’s death from drug overdose in 2023

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The personal assistant who injected Matthew Perry with ketamine several times with no medical training, including on the day the Friends actor was found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles residence, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison on Wednesday.

Kenneth Iwamasa, 61, had pleaded guilty to distributing ketamine that resulted in death or serious bodily injury. The sentence handed down to him matched what prosecutors requested.

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Imitation versions of Shakhtar Donetsk and Zorya Luhansk remain in Russian league, despite the real teams playing in Ukrainian competition

Uefa is yet to take action against the integration of clubs from illegally occupied parts of Ukraine into Russia’s football system despite being urged to do so by the Ukrainian Association of Football (UAF) last year.

Imitation versions of Shakhtar Donetsk and Zorya Luhansk, two of the most successful clubs in Ukraine’s Premier League, have been competing in Russia’s fourth tier since its season began in March. They have joined the Crimea-based sides Rubin Yalta and FC Sevastopol in group 1 of the regionalised Football National League 2B, meaning a quarter of the teams in their division purport to represent areas of occupied Ukraine.

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Hum, Helen Phillips’ third novel, featuring a woman whose job is taken by a humanoid robot, is a terrifying look into a future where AI rules and nature is scarce

A novel featuring a protagonist whose job is taken by AI has won the Climate fiction prize.

Hum by Helen Phillips, the American writer’s third novel, is about a woman, May, who loses her job to a “hum” of the title – a humanoid robot. Struggling to find work, she becomes a guinea pig for an experimental injection that alters her face so it can’t be recognised by surveillance. When she gets paid for it, she splashes out on family passes to the Botanical Garden, the last remaining green space in her city. There, things take a turn for the worse.

Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Helen Phillips will appear at Hay festival to discuss the book on Friday 30 May

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Mooie, melodieuze progmetal van Karmanjakah uit Zweden. Jullie luisteren naar het titelnummer van hun meest recente CD Diamond Morning. Er zit wat minder herrie in dit nummer dan wat ik normaal prefereer, maar hey, wel relaxed dit.