Uncle Juff revisits the age-old Juggalo question. (SLYT Juff)

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Mooie structuren in een kwal. Strand Meijendel.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Werken aan de sloot, Ypenburg.

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Imperial Hotel Lobby, Meiji-mura

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Meiji-mura

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Meiji-mura

mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

9457 San Fernando Rd, Sun Valley, CA 91352

Danish ecommerce company Miinto admitted an intruder has been looking at its order data, according to emails it sent to customers this week. The emails, seen by The Register, do not comment on the scale of the data accessed by the perp or how exactly the breach occurred, although UK-based customers of the Copenhagen-HQ'd biz have received them. “We are writing to let you know about a security incident that may have affected some of the personal data associated with a purchase you made on Miinto,” the email states. “We have reported this to the police and to the relevant data protection authority, and we are contacting you directly so that you know exactly what happened and what to watch out for. We know a notice like this can be unsettling, and we want to be as clear and transparent with you as we can.” “An unauthorized party gained access to our internal order management system, and the perpetrator may have retrieved order data where your order data is potentially included,” it adds. Miinto, an online marketplace for fashion brands, confirmed that names, email and physical addresses, and phone numbers were among the data types exposed to crooks. Customers’ payment methods were compromised too. The email explained this would reveal whether customers paid using a card, and what type of card, or pay-in-three services like Klarna, but the attack did not expose details such as card or verification numbers. Miinto warned customers of the risk of phishing attacks that impersonate the brand and use the details swiped from the breach to make communications seem more convincing. “We have taken this incident extremely seriously and have worked quickly to contain it,” the email states. It removed the intruder from systems and improved its security measures, increasing access controls on its order management system. “We sincerely apologize for any concern or distress this notice may cause,” Miinto wrote. “Protecting the information you entrust to us is a priority we do not take lightly. “We have already strengthened the security of our systems, and we are continuing to invest in measures designed to reduce the risk of anything like this happening again.” The company did not disclose the attack via public channels, nor did it respond to The Register’s request for comment. Founded in 2009, Miinto operates in 14 countries and in January reported annual revenues soaring 86 percent to 869 million kr ($132.9 million). ®

Dankzij de cruciale rol van de Nederlandse hightechsector schermt minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma van Buitenlandse Handel met grootmachten China en de VS over ASML-machines en eerlijker handel met Europa. „We boksen ver boven ons gewicht.”

Instagram en Facebook zijn „verslavend” en dus handelt het moederbedrijf van deze sociale netwerken, Meta, in strijd met EU-wetgeving.

Geopolitiek, handelsconflicten, digitaal geld en samenzwerende AI-agenten. De jaarlijkse denksessie van de Europese Centrale Bank gaf een fascinerend inkijkje in de denkwereld van de monetaire beleidsmakers.

Cécile McLorin Salvant is een van die zeldzame zangers en zangeressen die woorden werkelijk laten leven. Verder: jazzdrummer Jamie Peet maakt een mooie stap en het nieuwe fenomeen Sienna Spiro klinkt haar leeftijd ver vooruit.

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Light reflecting off the larger building to the right lighting up this wall in sunset colours.
Little Grenfell Street, Kent Town, South Australia

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Little Grenfell Street, Kent Town, South Australia

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Lovely stonework on the rear of Wesley Uniting Church, Kent Town, South Australia

Hugo de Jonge kon wel écht niks. Avondklok was chaos, 2G- en 3G-plannen waren chaos, prikken was chaos, gele boekkie was chaos, boosteren was chaos, testen was chaos, de rapporten waren chaos, beleid was chaos en het was echt niet allemaal de schuld van Hugo maar het was wel voor een groot deel de schuld van Hugo. Hugo de Jonge zat gewoon op dossier ouderenzorg, maar toen Bruno Bruins een tukkie ging doen werd Hugo plots in het middelpunt van ons corona-universum gekatapulteerd. Hoewel hij dat heel gaaf en interessant en spannend vond en het liefst alles zelf wilde doen, was hij simpelweg een maatje te klein, onze Huug. Iedereen en z'n ziekenhuis vond Hugo de Jonge maar een enorme Hugo, met die gare schoenen van 'm. Hugo kon niks, niet tellen, het land was in crisis en Hugo was eigenlijk alleen maar bezig met Hugo. Tegenwoordig zit Hugo lekker ver weg voor de rest van Nederland, in Zeeland, maar nu mag hij nog even de coronacommissie laten ontsporen. Veel déjà vu-plezier!

Update - Hugo de Jonge heeft z'n huiswerk zitten doen. Zegt dat kabinet drie doelen had: kwetsbaren bescrhemen, virus in de smiezen houden, voorkomen dat zorg overbelast zou raken. Hij noemt dat 'koorddansen'. Wij noemen dat Koorddansen met Janssen

Nobel-winning chemist Omar Yaghi is leaving UC Berkeley for China's Tsinghua University, where he will lead a new AI institute focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced materials. "Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world's foremost chemists," reports The New York Times. "The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity 'not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before.'" From the report: Dr. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water. Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook's depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States. Last year, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Dr. Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about Mr. Trump's immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation's system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. "I think it's regrettable," he said of Mr. Trump's nationalism. "We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved," he added. "That's an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the U.S. but the world."

Dr. Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances. He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas -- the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors. He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life -- carbon atoms in particular. While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them. The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Dr. Yaghi's students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialization.

In the interview with The Times, Dr. Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two. That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of emigres can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Dr. Yaghi has longstanding ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines. Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Dr. Yaghi is being named as the head of a new A.I. institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials. Its underlying aim, the university said, is to "overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches" and shorten the usual cycles of discovery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.

Think of these systems as automated speed cameras, but on steroids. Only they’ll enforce not just speed limits, but any other rule you can imagine. And you won’t receive a ticket weeks later by mail; you’ll be informed about and fined for your violation immediately.

These systems will combine powerful AI, public and private surveillance via real-time facial recognition technology and digital tracking, mass databases and highly personalized enforcement. If deployed at scale, they will have profound chilling effects not just on personal freedoms, but democracy and social progress itself.

China has been developing its surveillance infrastructure for years. The country has over 600 million surveillance cameras, increasingly powered by AI and facial recognition to enforce legal and social rules. Take the case of Lao Duan, a Chinese citizen blacklisted by the system after he lost his job and was unable to repay a series of loans. When he visited Beijing, the city’s AI surveillance system identified him by his face at a major intersection and displayed his face, name and citizen ID number on a large electronic billboard nearby with a message that he was an untrustworthy person. Similar systems are now being deployed across China and integrated with its infamous online monitoring, censorship and social credit systems.

AI surveillance is now being experimented with in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to a new report, the US Department of Homeland Security is rapidly increasing its use of AI-based surveillance, including facial recognition and the monitoring of social media accounts, to keep tabs on immigrants, dissidents, journalists, legal observers and protesters. While the systems are ostensibly used to maintain security and public safety, the real aim is often social control. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle—a powerful tech giant that works closely with the Trump administration—has said: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” The chilling effects are the point.

AI surveillance raises a range of public policy challenges: technical biases, unauditable systems, and inflexible automated law and social rule enforcement that can promote discrimination and undermine transparency, accountability and the rule of law. But we believe the most urgent and long-term impact will be its broader chilling effects.

In a new book, Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, Jon Penney explains how surveillance, technology and power can be weaponized to influence behavior at scale. Surveillance, personalization, uncertainty and authority are all key mechanisms to increase the scale and impact of chilling effects. They cause people to self-censor their words and actions, to become more conformist and compliant and thus easier to manage and control. And the effects are additive: the more mechanisms employed, and the more powerful the form, the greater the chill.

Computerization has long allowed data collectors to track our locations, collect lists of whom we communicate with, and monitor our spending habits—unless we use cash. What’s new is an unprecedented fusion of each of these mechanisms, persistent and unrelenting. AI brings an analytical ability to spy on the contents of our communications, and to answer sophisticated questions about our whereabouts and activities: actions that previously required human analysts are now automated. The result will be a kind of supercharged societal level of chilling effects where fear, self-censorship and groupthink reign, and dissent, creativity and innovation become increasingly rare.

In this atmosphere of fear and conformity, risky ideas, social activism and self-reinvention—especially by disfavored groups and targeted populations—are also chilled. This will have long-term effects on social progress.

Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.

There are no real historical precursors to this; these technologies are too new. Even the most notorious and large-scale domestic surveillance program in US history, the FBI’s use of wiretapping, physical mail opening, informants and paper index cards to track alleged communists during the 1950s and 1960s, appears genuinely archaic in light of modern AI-enhanced surveillance. So does East Germany’s human-centric surveillance network during the cold war. Only science fiction, from the likes of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, comes close. But even Big Brother’s “telescreen” feels decidedly mid-20th-century by comparison.

But we need not sit idly. Now that we recognize the danger of AI-enhanced mass surveillance, we can make the policy choices not to implement it. Bans on facial recognition and other forms of identification tech can slow development; robust new privacy and data protections can restrict data tracking and retention; AI regulations can curtail its most invasive uses; and structural reforms can help us scrutinize and break up powerful state/tech cartels that pave the way for technological excesses like AI surveillance.

The chill of AI-powered mass surveillance will suffocate the very foundations of healthy democratic societies. But we can still choose a different path.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Guardian.