Grinderman

@Pepijn
Server software, lyrion of navidrome is mijn suggestie, een android touchscreen, voor beide servers is een app, orangesqueeze voor lyrion, ik gebruik navic voor navidrome.
Op je nas kan in elk geval lyrion draaien, ik gok navidrome zou ook moeten lukken.

Central bank chief says continent’s AI dependency could give trade partners unprecedented leverage in negotiations

Europe must develop its own AI technology and build more datacentres in order to nullify the threat of being cut off by the US or China, according to the president of the European Central Bank.

Christine Lagarde said the continent needed AI models – the technology that powers AI tools such as chatbots – that were “good enough” to carry out most tasks and run from domestic datacentres. If Europe invests in its own AI tech, said Lagarde, “the threat of being cut off loses its force”.

Continue reading...

Famous for his flamboyant outfits, he helped celebrities including Cher, Tina Turner and Elton John cause a stir

Bob Mackie, the costume designer behind some of the most sexy and glamorous outfits worn by celebrities in the past 50 years, has died at the age of 87.

“He lived his 87 years to the fullest, fulfilling his dream of being a fashion and costume designer, which is all he ever wanted to do,” read a statement posted on his Instagram account. “His genius and extraordinary designs will live on forever, continuing to bring beauty into this world.”

Continue reading...

⚽ Premier League updates from the 8pm BST kick-off
⚽ 10 weekend talking points | And you can mail Daniel

Fernandez-Pardo was, I’m sure, signed to be a starter. He’s had time to settle into a new home and have a look at things; now it’s time to get to work. The sense is he’ll be on the top line, with Wissa behind him.

Alreet, I’ll write those down, then we’ll consider what we might see.

Continue reading...

US president’s eldest child married Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson in three-day celebration across two exclusive private islands

• US politics live – latest updates

A top Democrat has demanded answers after it was reported that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in the Bahamas earlier this year.

Trump Jr, the US president’s eldest child, married Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson in a lavish three-day celebration across two exclusive private islands in May, which according to ProPublica was partially bankrolled by Umar Kremlev, a member of the Russian president’s circle.

Continue reading...

The vast sums given to Nigel Farage’s party in recent days must lead to action on political funding

The staggering sums gifted to Reform UK over the weekend have transformed the context for the representation of the people bill making its way through parliament. The announcement of two £36m donations from Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, both crypto billionaires who have lived abroad, makes Andy Burnham’s decision not to impose a limit on political donations – a move he supported before becoming prime minister – look even more misguided. Fortunately the House of Lords still has the chance to amend the bill. It should take it by imposing meaningful limits on both political donations and party spending.

It is unclear whether either man meets the criteria set out in the Rycroft review into foreign influence in politics. It set a maximum of £100,000 per annum for people who have not been in the UK for at least a year. Mr Delo previously lived in Hong Kong while Mr Harborne is based partly in Thailand; Nigel Farage said on Monday that he does not know the details of their movements. While ministers will view the prospect of a legal fight over eligibility with trepidation, they must do what it takes to ensure rules are met.

Continue reading...

Donald Trump’s blithe comments at the weekend were characteristically unhelpful. A careful and considered discussion on the subject has yet to begin

A decade ago, the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) viewed Brexit as a potential gamechanger in the struggle to resist future pressure for a united Ireland. As the author and journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote in an essay published last year, the DUP hoped that the 2016 referendum would deliver “a double exit. Brexit would not simply mean the UK’s departure from the EU. It would also be an act of separation from the Republic. It would reverse the slow drift towards integration.” That proved to be, to put it mildly, a deeply flawed judgment.

The direction of travel since 2016 has instead been the opposite. Rather than leading to a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, which would have disastrously undermined the Good Friday agreement, the UK’s divorce agreement from Brussels eventually placed one in the Irish Sea. The logic of further economic integration between north and south within the EU’s single market was reinforced.

Continue reading...

Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.

Tags: movies · music · Project Hail Mary · video

Computer security researchers have identified a design flaw in modern encryption hardware that allows access to protected memory in notionally confidential computing environments. But the attacker would need physical access to the victim system. Boffins affiliated with KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham University, and Google have found that scalable memory encryption hardware fails to check whether the data in memory is fresh. As a result, they've been able to devise a small hardware interposer, dubbed DDRop, that when wired to an appropriate circuit board, interferes with DDR5 write operations. Unable to tell that memory isn't fresh, a protected VM becomes vulnerable to a replay attack that uses stale, attacker-selected data. They describe their work in a paper titled, "DDRop: Active Memory Interposer Attacks on Confidential VMs by Dropping DDR5 Writes." Their attack requires physical access and so it is relevant mainly in scenarios where confidential computing guarantees have been made to tenants by cloud service providers. "DDRop uses a custom-built 'interposer': a small, custom-designed circuit board, costing under $200, that sits between the processor and a memory module," explained Jo Van Bulck, a professor in the DistriNet lab at KU Leuven, Belgium, in an email to The Register. "It corrupts commands on the high-speed DDR5 memory bus to silently drop writes to encrypted memory. The protected VM keeps computing on old data that still decrypts perfectly. We are releasing the complete interposer design as open-source hardware." The attack breaks the integrity of Intel TDX, Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP, used in trusted execution environments (TEEs). Van Bulck and colleagues Jesse De Meulemeester, Stefan Gloor, Patrick Jattke, Daniel Moghimi, David Oswald, Martin Thompson, Kaveh Razavi, and Ingrid Verbauwhede developed a proof-of-concept attack on a current Intel TDX server. "By injecting maliciously crafted secure page-table entries, we can force any protected VM into debug mode and read out its private memory in plaintext," said Van Bulck. "Furthermore, writing to critical TDX metadata structures enables forged attestation reports, so that a backdoored VM appears trusted to the remote user." Both attacks, said Van Bulck, succeed deterministically in under two minutes without crashing the machine. Several of these researchers developed a similar attack on DDR4. But Van Bulck said this is the first active interposer attack on DDR5. "DDR5’s redesigned command bus prevents the address-aliasing tricks used by Battering RAM, and until now, only considerably weaker passive attacks had been demonstrated on DDR5: TEE.fail monitors the data bus using bulky, second-hand logic analyzers that are easier to detect and require slowing the memory bus to its lowest speed to observe ciphertext patterns, which can be masked in software," he explained. DDRop differs in that it alters DDR5 bus traffic at full speed. According to Van Bulck, it's the first attack to subvert TDX's trusted management interface without exploiting a software bug. It also reduces the cost of prior interposition attacks that took an estimated $170,000 in lab equipment to perform. There's no easy fix for Intel's and AMD's current scalable memory-encryption designs, said Van Bulck, and no simple software or hardware patch that can address the root cause. "Scalable memory encryption deliberately trades cryptographic freshness (e.g., available in early Intel SGX offerings supporting only 128/256 MB of protected memory) for the ability to protect large amounts of memory in cloud systems," he said. Noting that Intel's Simon Johnson recently discussed memory-interposer attacks at an industry conference, Van Bulck said that planned mitigations like "cache line versioning" still appear to be vulnerable to DDRop. In a security bulletin released on Monday, Intel acknowledged the DDRop disclosure and said the attack is out of scope for its cloud computing threat model. The company said it is "evaluating additional architectural hardening options and detection mechanisms as part of ongoing platform security improvements…" AMD also said the attack is out of scope and no mitigation is planned. ®

OpenAI agents appear to have flooded RubyGems with malicious packages, adding to a near-daily deluge of rogue AI models engaging in potentially unlawful activity while their human creators face growing questions over responsibility for their agents’ bad behavior. A swarm of agents began uploading malware to the Ruby package registry on May 5, and flooded RubyGems with more than 2,000 malicious packages between May 11 and May 12, ultimately forcing maintainers to disable new user registration for four days. “We believe these were authored by internal OpenAI agents,” researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx said on Friday. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the model maker is investigating the incident. “Based on our review, our agents used the RubyGems platform to access the internet to carry out benign tasks and retrieve public information," the spokesperson said. "We’ll continue to investigate as part of our broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation.” This same trio of researchers earlier this month said that they found evidence that OpenAI’s swarm hijacked a German wiki months before the AI agents attacked Hugging Face. As they did during the German wiki incident, the agents involved in the RubyGems abuse self-identified as being from OpenAI. Hundreds of the gems included “oai” in their name, and 15 set “oai” as their author. At least one other used “openaixyz65947@gmail.com” as the email address for contact. Also according to the researchers, more than 100 of the malicious packages followed the same exploitation path, submitting a malicious package to the public library and triggering a documentation request to force RubyDoc.info to build the package. OpenAI’s agents then used the build script to run code on RubyDoc.info, scrape targeted websites, and steal data from the documentation server by publishing another gem to the public Ruby language package registry, the researchers said. “Additionally, once the AIs got arbitrary RCE on the build environment, they would sometimes use the build environment to attempt to steal other users’ API keys (though we are unsure if they succeeded or not),” they wrote. The agentic swarm also found and attempted to exploit a zero-day CDN caching bug on May 12 that wasn’t discovered by maintainers until July. The vulnerability would have allowed the AIs to steal users’ API keys. At least six of the malicious packages, including one named slnleaker5, used this security hole, the researchers said. Most of the agentic activity happened in May. After the RubyGems team added security measures such as requiring verified emails for new signups, OpenAI’s agents resumed their efforts on June 18 and published 83 gems over three hours. While the researchers note that they don’t know whether the swarm used a shared message board to communicate, as agents did during the Hugging Face intrusions, they “suspect” the bots were coordinating and likely had some way to exchange information. The researchers also said that it’s “unclear” if or when OpenAI learned that its agents were using RubyGems to scrape publicly available data. “It seems that either their monitors failed to catch it or they did not disclose it,” the trio wrote. This seems to be the case with other recent agentic hacks traced back to OpenAI’s models going rogue during training exercises. To be fair, Anthropic’s bots have also gained unauthorized access to third-party systems over the past few months without being caught at the time by their human supervisors. In light of the increasingly apocalyptic warnings around AI - or perhaps in a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture - several of the industry’s biggest bosses over the weekend backed a collective slowdown of AI training and development, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that future agents could become “capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.” Meanwhile, President Trump said on Truth Social, "the only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a strong and smart (high IQ!) president," and claimed his administration has stopped "AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things.'"® Editor's note: This story was amended post-publication with comment from OpenAI.

Lawrence Barretto picks out his winners and losers from the Spanish Grand Prix weekend

"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage."

These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances.
During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available....

According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 — the same year it has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality. That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits.


In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources — such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower — which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California's grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state's electrical system weather this year's long-lasting heat.

"Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Een glas tripel op het horecaterras kan volgend jaar tot 30 cent duurder worden. Niet door één belastingmaatregel, maar door drie verhogingen die per 1 januari 2027 tegelijk ingaan. De brouwersbranche noemt het een kater, nog vóór de troonrede is voorgelezen.

Drie heffingen tegelijk

Vlak voor Prinsjesdag stuurden Nederlandse Brouwers en CRAFT een brandbrief aan het kabinet met een dringende oproep: laat de bieraccijns, de waterheffing en het kleinbrouwerstarief ongewijzigd. De brief is gericht aan premier Rob Jetten, de vicepremiers en de fractievoorzitters van de coalitiepartijen, en draagt de veelzeggende titel Kater. Over de petitie die de branche lanceerde schreven we eerder.

Vanaf 1 januari 2027 wordt de bieraccijns jaarlijks geïndexeerd, waardoor het tarief automatisch meebeweegt met de inflatie. Daarnaast verhoogt het kabinet de prijs van een van de belangrijkste ingrediënten van bier: water. En als derde wil het kabinet het kleinbrouwerstarief afschaffen: de accijnskorting van 7,5% die brouwerijen onder de 200.000 hectoliter nu krijgen.

Volgens CRAFT is het afschaffen van het kleinbrouwerstarief geen bezuinigingsmaatregel. De maatregel levert de schatkist hooguit 2 miljoen euro op. Voor de overheid is dat een verwaarloosbaar bedrag, terwijl het voor kleine brouwerijen het verschil kan betekenen tussen doorgaan en stoppen.

De rekening voor jou

De belasting op bier bedraagt nu al circa 30% van de prijs. Door de gestapelde maatregelen kan een glas tripel op het terras tot 30 cent duurder worden, waarschuwt de branche. Vooral zwaardere speciaalbieren worden geraakt: hoe hoger het alcoholpercentage, hoe meer accijns.

De Nederlandse bierdrinker betaalt straks tot 9 keer meer belasting op zijn bier dan de Duitse.

Duitsland beschermt, Nederland heft

De bieraccijnzen in Nederland zijn bijna twee keer hoger dan in België en zelfs vier tot negen keer hoger dan in Duitsland, afhankelijk van de soort bier. Het verschil met Duitsland wordt alleen maar groter, omdat in Nederland de accijns weer wordt verhoogd terwijl het Duitse kabinet juist heeft besloten om bier vrij te stellen van de alcoholaccijnsverhoging die daar volgend jaar wordt doorgevoerd.

Het gevolg: waar vroeger enkel mensen die dicht bij de Belgische of Duitse grens woonden de oversteek waagden, loont het inmiddels ook als je in Utrecht of Zwolle woont om je inkopen over de grens te doen. De branchevereniging verwacht dat een groter prijsverschil de grensaankopen verder aanwakkert, met schade voor de Nederlandse detailhandel, horecasector en schatkist.

Een krimpende markt

In het eerste halfjaar van 2026 is 2,8% minder alcoholhoudend bier verkocht dan in dezelfde periode in 2025. Ten opzichte van 2024 is er zelfs sprake van een daling van 5,3%. Drie op de tien brouwerijen verwachten dit jaar en volgend jaar verlies te maken, komt naar voren uit een peiling onder 143 brouwerijen.

Het kabinet rekent zichzelf volgens de sector onterecht rijk met de verhoging van de bieraccijns: na de verhoging in 2024 zijn de inkomsten voor de schatkist niet gestegen maar zelfs gedaald.

Nog niet definitief

De maatregelen horen bij het Belastingplan 2027 en moeten nog door de Tweede en de Eerste Kamer, dus definitief zijn ze niet. Het kabinet presenteert het plan morgen op Prinsjesdag. Naast de brandbrief loopt er een petitie om de verhogingen van tafel te krijgen.

Of dat lukt, is afwachten. Maar de richting is duidelijk: voor hetzelfde glas bier betaal je in Nederland steeds meer, en net over de grens steeds minder.

Bronnen: Biernet.nl · CRAFT · Nederlandse Brouwers

BRUSSEL (ANP/RTR) - Het Europees Parlement gaat een kantoor openen in de Canadese hoofdstad Ottawa. In de aankondiging staat dat deze stap moet helpen bij het versterken van de relatie tussen de Europese en Canadese volksvertegenwoordigingen.

Brussel en Ottawa zijn al langer bezig met het aanhalen van de banden. De Canadese premier Mark Carney maakte dit weekend bekend interesse te hebben in een alternatieve vorm van lidmaatschap, met Canada als 'geassocieerd lid' van de Europese Unie.

De opening van het kantoor weerspiegelt het "nauwe en langdurige partnerschap" tussen de Europese Unie en Canada, aldus de verklaring van het Europees Parlement. Het besluit komt enkele dagen voor de toespraak van Carney in het Europees Parlement.

Het Europees Parlement heeft momenteel negen kantoren buiten de Europese Unie om banden met organisaties of landen te onderhouden, bijvoorbeeld in New York voor de Verenigde Naties, Londen voor het Verenigd Koninkrijk en Ethiopië voor de Afrikaanse Unie.

U.S. President Donald Trump said earlier that Ukraine and Russia had agreed not to hit each other's energy targets.