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Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary and will face Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in the midterms. And, today, Dr. Anthony Fauci faces a contempt of Congress vote.

(Image credit: Jeff Kowalsky)

Вот маркетинговая задачка: вам приносят отчёт и предлагают увеличить бюджет на следующий квартал. На первый взгляд всё выглядит хорошо: коэффициент LTV/СAC = 4, значит, каждый клиент приносит в 4 раза больше, чем стоит его привлечение. Запускаемся?

На издательской платформе «Литрес» опубликован четвертый номер продолжения проекта Федора Михайловича Достоевского «Дневник писателя»: «Смогут ли ИИ-агенты заменить Грефа и Набиуллину?». Ответ: смогут, но не заменят, хотя ИИ приведет (с высокой вероятностью) к кардинальному изменению представлений руководителей Сбербанка и ЦБ об экономике и финансах, а также к настоящей революции в денежно-кредитной политике страны, причем случится это уже в ближайшие годы.

Сейчас в мире возникает все больше опасений в связи с перспективой замены ИИ-ассистентами и ИИ-агентами людей, в первую очередь в профессиях, связанных с рутинными действиями и однотипными физическими и интеллектуальными операциями, в то время как руководители, как принято считать, сохранят свои позиции. Однако если проанализировать деятельность некоторых современных руководителей, таких как Герман Греф и Эльвира Набиуллина, то можно обнаружить, что ИИ вполне сможет заменить и их.

Произойдет это не потому, что руководители банков осуществляют много рутинных операций, а потому что ИИ может обрабатывать большие массивы данных и учитывать в своих выводах намного больше факторов, чем люди.

Греф и Набиуллина, несмотря на высокие посты, всего лишь люди, и в своих решениях они опираются на ограниченный набор факторов, то есть рассматривают не экономику и финансы в целом, а некоторые модели экономики и финансов. Это нормально: способности человека работать с информацией, независимо от того, является он водителем такси, бухгалтером или руководителем крупного банка, ограничены, поэтому он не может видеть экономические явления во всей полноте чисто физически – слишком много факторов на них влияет. Человек выделяет несколько факторов и строит модели, обладающие ограниченной применимостью.

Plans involve dredging and expanding docks to allow larger cruise ships to visit with up to 200,000 passengers annually

Janavi Kramer had just enjoyed a swim with friends and was sitting on a bench taking in a wonderful Cornish view – headlands plunging into deep water, bobbing boats, a bustling harbour town.

“We’re lucky to have this space,” said Kramer, who is an artist and scientific illustrator. “We use it for work, recreation and pleasure and it’s so scary to think that this could all be harmed. I worry about what we may be living with soon and what we’ll be leaving for future generations.”

(Atlantic)
Evoking an astonishing range of artists, the US singer follows up her huge hit Love Me Not with stylistic diversity – and lyrics that defy her doubters

It sometimes seems like no musical success in the 2020s is allowed to pass without some degree of online controversy. There are accusations that the artist in question is an “industry plant” – a phrase which, as far as can be discerned, can basically be applied to anyone with a manager or a label deal – or that there’s something deceptive about the way in which they’ve been promoted, or that they’re possessed of some other form of moral bankruptcy that reflects not merely on the performer but the people who like them. Which brings us to Love Me Not, an ostensibly harmless 2024 track by Chicago singer-songwriter Ravyn Lenae.

After enjoying a burst of online virality, it became a huge hit single, making the Top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken from Bird’s Eye, an album that also featured collaborations with Childish Gambino and Ty Dolla $ign, its blend of retro-soul styling, distorted guitar arpeggios and infernally catchy chorus was noticeably poppier than Lenae’s previous work: it came with a remix that featured British bedroom-pop star Rex Orange County. You could understand why fans of the glitchy, abstract R&B found on 2015’s EP Moon Shoes, or of her more neo soul-flavoured debut album, 2022’s Hypnos, might consider it a straightforward bid for mainstream acceptance. But you’d argue against it necessitating an online interrogation that, Lenae has suggested, involved not just “picking apart what kind of music I make” but “questioning my identity and Blackness”.

Plans involve dredging and expanding docks to allow larger cruise ships to visit with up to 200,000 passengers annually

Janavi Kramer had just enjoyed a swim with friends and was sitting on a bench taking in a wonderful Cornish view – headlands plunging into deep water, bobbing boats, a bustling harbour town.

“We’re lucky to have this space,” said Kramer, who is an artist and scientific illustrator. “We use it for work, recreation and pleasure and it’s so scary to think that this could all be harmed. I worry about what we may be living with soon and what we’ll be leaving for future generations.”

Former European heavyweights, investment projects and teams from tiny towns will liven up the top tiers

Absent from La Liga since 2018, Dépor were once part of a Spanish “big four” with Barcelona, Valencia and Real Madrid. The Galicians were title-race disruptors over a sustained period, finishing in the top three on nine occasions between 1993 and 2004 and winning the title in 1999. Had they not come up against José Mourinho’s Porto in the 2004 Champions League semi-finals, they might have been European champions too. Eventually, the established order prevailed and Deportivo slid into mid-table, then fell away completely – dropping into the regional third tier in 2020. It took four years to battle back to the second tier, but Dépor then leapt from 15th place in 2024-25 to earn automatic promotion last term. The golden era of Juan Carlos Valerón and Diego Tristan is long gone but the club are showing ambition, signing Mallorca keeper Leo Román and veteran striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang as they bid to hold steady in La Liga. Deportivo are not the only long-term absentees returning this season: Segunda champions Racing Santander are back after 15 years, while Málaga also went down in 2018 and fell into the third tier for a single season in 2023-24.

We’re seeing America wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us

With the victory of progressive Abdul El-Sayed over representative Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary, prepare yourself to hear enormous quantities of bullshit about the Democratic party now being “taken over” by the “left” or by “democratic socialists”.

Or as the reliably establishment New York Times put it: “Can an insurgent candidate, with unabashedly liberal positions, win a general election in a moderate state?”

Restaurant critic and award-winning author Jimi Famurewa meets broth obsessives in unlikely parts of Britain who fell in with the ancient ramen tradition - and found a hungry audience for their new noodle bowls.

The palm-sized greengrocer is bright, loud and abundant, and has long been a collectible item for Australian children

• Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year

Before marbles, stamps and trading cards, there were cicadas.

There are thousands of cicada species globally, but for Australian children the craze centres on one particularly collectible item: the greengrocer.

Experts say growing trend on sites such as Polymarket and Kalshi could motivate people to start fires to win money

A group of US lawmakers is sounding the alarm over prediction market platforms that allow users to bet on wildfires, as experts warn the emerging trend could raise the risk of arson.

Democratic senators from six states sent a letter this week to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent government agency regulating platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi, urging it to rein in the practice.

When asked to detail what would make a better life in three to five years, 60% of US adults said greater financial security

Americans may seem increasingly divided on beliefs and values, but in a new survey of more than 30,000 adults from across the country spanning generations and economic classes, a majority of Americans agree there’s a significant barrier to achieving a better life: the rising cost of living.

When asked to describe what a better life in three to five years would look like, 60% of Americans said they wanted greater financial security, according to a survey that was conducted by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the WK Kellogg Foundation in mid-April.

New CEO Dave Lewis lifts investors’ spirits by promising strategic overhaul worthy of his nickname ‘Drastic Dave’

Diageo’s new chief executive has unveiled plans to nearly double Guinness production while hacking back a “significant” proportion of its 30,000-strong workforce, in a strategic overhaul worthy of his nickname, “Drastic” Dave Lewis.

Shares in Diageo bounced on Thursday, as the former Tesco boss faced down the first big test of his initial half-year in the job, after being parachuted in last November to revive the flagging fortunes of the UK-based drinks company.

Многие слышали новости о многомиллионных налоговых претензиях к российским блогерам, но мало кто знает, чем в итоге закончились эти громкие истории, начавшиеся еще в 2023 году. В этой статье я разберу, за что именно осудили Гасанова и Чекалину (Лерчек), как первоначальные налоговые претензии связаны с итоговыми обвинениями и насколько обоснованно они выглядят.

Добавлю, что эту тему я разбираю не случайно. Более 10 лет я проработал в контрольном блоке ФНС, участвовал в налоговых проверках, подготовке и передаче материалов в правоохранительные органы. Поэтому хорошо понимаю, как формируются такие материалы, какие обстоятельства в них оцениваются.

Привет, это Данил Киселев, сетевой инженер в Yandex Infrastructure. Представьте себе, что у вас не просто офис, а очень большой офис с тысячами пользователей, которые ходят с созвона на созвон, перемещаясь между переговорками. Разумеется, им хочется оставаться на связи в процессе и не думать о ближайших точках доступа к Wi‑Fi. Для сетевого инженера это не выглядит проблемой на небольших масштабах. Но что если скоро ваш офис вырастет и таких точек доступа в сетевой фабрике может стать уже 20 000 и больше?

В статье расскажу про опыт использования технологии VxLAN в корпоративных сетях Яндекса. В частности речь пойдёт про построение Wi‑Fi поверх VxLAN‑туннелей, которые таким образом смогли помочь нам с большим доменом и заодно избежать широковещательного шторма.

Young American men are in trouble. They are the loneliest demographic in the Western world. Their social circles are shrinking. At all ages, they are significantly more likely to die by suicide than their female peers.

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades. 

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play. 

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?

In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.

Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”

The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them. 

What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it. 

In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?

The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.

It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.

Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.

Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?

It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically. 

Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.

I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.

A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?

I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them. 

The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.” 

When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”

How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?

One of the best examples was in 2022, when Epic Games did fundraisers for the Red Cross through things like Fortnite. Their game store raised more money for the charity and its work in places like Ukraine than were donated to it by the countries of France or Italy.

You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities. 

That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.

I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?

Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds. 

This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society. 

The loss of investment in third spaces, especially for teens, is definitely something we’re seeing in the US as well.

You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?

I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association. 

Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work. 

So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”

Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games. 

It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent. 

Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign. 

It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.

У EAN-13 есть контрольная цифра, и из этого обычно делают вывод: раз проверка сошлась, номер прочитан верно. Вывод неверный. Я получил с одной книги три разных номера, и все три контрольную цифру проходят. Разбираю, почему так выходит, почему у QR такой беды нет и что с этим делать — с кодом, замерами и таблицей, откуда взялась каждая цифра.

New CEO Dave Lewis lifts investors’ spirits by promising strategic overhaul worthy of his nickname ‘Drastic Dave’

Diageo’s new chief executive has unveiled plans to nearly double Guinness production while hacking back a “significant” proportion of its 30,000-strong workforce, in a strategic overhaul worthy of his nickname, “Drastic” Dave Lewis.

Shares in Diageo bounced on Thursday, as the former Tesco boss faced down the first big test of his initial half-year in the job, after being parachuted in last November to revive the flagging fortunes of the UK-based drinks company.

Pair of orders come month after supreme court struck down administration’s earlier attempt to place restrictions on birthright citizenship enshrined in US constitution

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One quick note on the contempt resolution: Senator Rand Paul may try to send it straight to the Department of Justice, since advancing it in the Senate would require 60 votes. Republicans hold just 53 seats, making it almost certain to fall short of that threshold.

Republicans on a Senate committee voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress on Thursday. This comes after a bitter hearing last week, where the retired public health official invoked the fifth amendment for fear of self-incrimination and possible prosecution by Republican lawmakers on the homeland security and governmental affairs committee – who have routinely vilified Fauci for his handling of the Covid-19 response.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump signs new orders targeting birthright citizenship

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One quick note on the contempt resolution: Senator Rand Paul may try to send it straight to the Department of Justice, since advancing it in the Senate would require 60 votes. Republicans hold just 53 seats, making it almost certain to fall short of that threshold.

Republicans on a Senate committee voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress on Thursday. This comes after a bitter hearing last week, where the retired public health official invoked the fifth amendment for fear of self-incrimination and possible prosecution by Republican lawmakers on the homeland security and governmental affairs committee – who have routinely vilified Fauci for his handling of the Covid-19 response.

Lowe questioned on BBC about definition in report for hard-right party that both parents need to be born in UK

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, refused to say he believes King Charles can be classified as a “white Briton” in an extraordinary interview on the BBC’s Today programme.

Questioning Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, over his claims that “white Britons will become a minority by 2063”, the presenter, Nick Robinson, noted that the forecast Lowe referred to defined a “white Briton” as someone whose parents were both born in the UK.

Привет, меня зовут Надя, я продуктовый менеджер сервиса «Фейскит». Наша команда делает программу, которая помогает не терять шуруповерты, болгарки и пассатижи в суровой реальности стройки. Изначально мы задумывали продукт как простой и надежный способ учета инструментов и материалов. Но жизнь распорядилась иначе: за четыре года мы прошли путь от систематизации данных из Excel-таблиц до запроса на интеграцию с бухгалтерией. Рассказываю по порядку, как все было. 

Данная статья содержит обзор графического фреймворка “Арго”, предназначенного для быстрой разработки полноценного пользовательского интерфейса для управления приложениями. Это кроссплатформенное решение, которое может работать на различных операционных системах и аппаратных платформах, и, прежде всего, на устройствах в условиях очень ограниченных ресурсов по быстродействию процессора и оперативной памяти. Это полностью отечественная разработка, практически независимая от зарубежных продуктов и Open Source разработок.

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In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.

Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began. 

At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war. 

And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable? 

Quite worried, indeed. 

When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap. 

These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world. 

Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks. 

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.” 

About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.

“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant. 

How did this happen at all? 

When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators. 

Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.

The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents. 

How do we avoid cyber-armageddon?

If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go. 

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly. 

Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises. 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” 

Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.

At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.

Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress. 

In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely. 

As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”

Настало время рассказать, что интересного произошло в плане DDoS за второй квартал этого жаркого года. Произошло, надо сказать, немало, и некоторые зафиксированные нами тренды специалистам по ИБ будут особенно интересны — впрочем, как и просто тем, кто хочет знать, насколько большая опасность подстерегает их отрасль в середине 2026 года.

Parents and teachers worry about the number of kids who vape cannabis. But many of them are using something far more dangerous – without even realising it

I bumped into an old acquaintance the other day. Updating me on his children’s ages, he said, with an eyeroll of resignation: “My daughter’s 15 now; just found a cannabis vape in her room.” It’s an increasingly common and concerning situation for parents – with no way of telling if a vape does in fact contain weed (which comes with its own risks, just like vaping tobacco) or something much worse.

Instead of the natural cannabinoids THC or CBD, these vapes can contain a much cheaper substitute: the “prison drug” spice. Last year scientists from the University of Bath analysed 1,923 vapes that had been confiscated from children in 114 schools in England, and found that 13% contained spice. In London and Lancashire it was 25%. And this is among vapes of all kinds, nicotine included, not just those that purported to contain cannabis. As for vapes labelled as containing THC, CBD or cannabis, when the drug-testing service Wedinos (part of Public Health Wales) examined 297 samples received in the year up to March 2025, it found that 39% contained spice.

Lowe questioned on BBC about definition in report for hard-right party that both parents need to be born in UK

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, refused to say he believes King Charles can be classified as a “white Briton” in an extraordinary interview on the BBC’s Today programme.

Questioning Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, over his claims that “white Britons will become a minority by 2063”, the presenter, Nick Robinson, noted that the forecast Lowe referred to defined a “white Briton” as someone whose parents were both born in the UK.

Profit jump fuelled largely by unknown US refund amount as Japanese video game firm records quarterly sales drop

Nintendo has reported a jump in profits, as the Japanese game maker’s earnings were buoyed up by a long-awaited refund on Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The company said profits surged 53.5% to ¥147.4bn (£694m) over the three months to June, substantially beating expert forecasts for ¥77.8bn.