Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.

Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s robots.txt, the text file that tells bots which pages they can access on a website. But, as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-combating tool, not all AI scrapers respect this.

Beryl lashed Jamaica with strong winds and storm surge and strong waves as the Category 4 hurricane brushed the southern coast of the island Wednesday, officials said.

Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 140 mph when it brushed the Caribbean nation of 2.8 million, and it had 130 mph winds as it approached the southwestern part of the country at 8 p.m., the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm, which had made history as the strongest hurricane ever recorded in July before it was downgraded from Category 5 to Category 4, has been blamed for at least seven deaths as it devastated parts of the Windward Islands and caused flooding and damage in Venezuela.

No deaths have been reported in Jamaica, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said. He said the hurricane was moving quickly, "which is good for us. The quicker it moves, the better."

Hurricane Beryl leaves "Armaggedon-like" destruction

Caribbean leaders are taking to social media in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, sharing shocking images and video of widespread destruction.

Grenada's prime minister described sweeping destruction on the Caribbean nation's island of Carriacou as "almost Armageddon-like," while the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines called the damage to Union Island "a devastating spectacle."

The storm made landfall on the tiny island of Grenada on Monday as a Category 4, wiping out much of the island's electrical infrastructure, homes and agriculture.

"Almost total damage or destruction of all buildings, whether they be public buildings, homes or other private facilities," Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said on Tuesday. "Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture. Complete and total destruction of the natural environment. There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou."

Carriacou, which means "Isle of Reefs," is just 13 square miles, but it is the second-largest island within Grenada. Hurricane Beryl's size and strength completely overpowered the island, as well as its neighbor, St. Vincent and the Grenadines' Union Island, which saw 90% of its homes severely damaged or destroyed.

A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide anthem.” “One, two, shoot!” its refrain thunders.

Despite demands from employees and activists for its removal, “HarbuDarbu” has been allowed to stay up on YouTube. Crucially, YouTube determined that the song’s violent rhetoric targets Hamas, not Palestinians as a whole, and that as a US-labeled terrorist organization Hamas can be subject to hate speech without penalty, according to three people involved in or briefed on content moderation work at YouTube but not authorized to discuss it.

Employees who want the video removed say it should count as hate speech because, they contend, the lyrics urge violence against all Palestinians by mentioning Amalek, a Biblical term used throughout history to describe Israel’s enemies.

A temperature event of 33 degrees Celsius in Dublin's Phoenix Park has gone from being a 1 in 180-year event in 1942 to a 1 in 9-year event in 2020, according to a study led by Ireland's Maynooth University.

The study, which developed a new model to predict the frequency, magnitude and spatial extent of extreme summer temperature events in Ireland, also estimates that a temperature of more than 34 degrees Celsius—a value not yet recorded in Ireland—changed from a 1 in 1,600-year event to a 1 in 28-year event between 1942 and 2020.

According to Prof Parnell, "We are often focused on average changes, and particularly focus on the Paris Climate Agreement of 1.5 degrees Celsius. What we have shown here is that the changes in extremes are much larger than the changes in the average, and are something we should be seriously concerned about."

He said the findings underscored the urgency for societal adaptation to increasing extreme temperature events, which have profound implications for public health, agriculture, economic stability, and infrastructure resilience. The research team believe that the model's ability to predict spatial patterns of extreme events offers a powerful tool for policymakers and stakeholders to mitigate risks and plan for future climate scenarios.

Brazil’s data protection authority (ANPD) has banned Meta from training its artificial intelligence models on Brazilian personal data, citing the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users.” The decision follows an update to Meta’s privacy policy in May in which the social media giant granted itself permission to use public Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram data from Brazil — including posts, images, and captions — for AI training.

The decision follows a report published by Human Rights Watch last month which found that LAION-5B — one of the largest image-caption datasets used to train AI models — contains personal, identifiable photos of Brazilian children, placing them at risk of deepfakes and other exploitation.

We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” says Noriko Shikama, 76. She lives alone in a flat Tokiwadaira, in Tokyo’s commuter belt and has come to the Iki Iki drop-in centre to catch up with residents over cups of coffee served by volunteers.

Here, amid the everyday discussions about the merits or otherwise of dyeing grey hair, people also share news about the latest lonely death, or kodokushi – officially defined as one in which “a person dies without being cared for by anyone, and whose body is found after a certain period”.

Almost 22,000 people in Japan died at home alone in the first three months of this year, according to a recent report by the national police agency, about 80% of them aged 65 or older. By the end of the year, the agency estimates that cases of solitary deaths will reach 68,000, compared with about 27,000 in 2011.

Tokiwadaira in the town of Matsudo was the first community forced to confront the distressing phenomenon two decades ago, with the discovery of a man whose corpse had been lying in his apartment unnoticed for three years. His rent and bills had been paid automatically, and his death was noticed only when his savings ran out.

“The economy was booming then, and families were desperate to live here. It was a lively place. But now everyone is getting old,” says Oshima, who moved to Tokiwadaira with her husband and young son in 1961, when the estate was home to 15,000 people.

Now, as Japan’s population continues to age, more people are spending the final years of their lives in isolation. The number of people over 65 living alone stood at 7.38 million in 2020 and is expected to rise to almost 11 million by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Single-person households account for almost 38% of total households, according to the 2020 census, a 13.3% rise from the previous survey conducted five years earlier.

It's raining ads in Windows 11. The Microsoft Weather app in the operating system now displays more ads.

You may recall that a year ago, Microsoft had actually removed the ads from the app, and it appeared that the company had finally listened to feedback from users. But the annoying banners are back, and there's two of them now on the Forecast page. For those unaware, the old version of Microsoft Weather was a UWP app, but the company replaced it with an Edge WebView, which is a container that uses the Edge Engine. In other words, the Weather app is technically just a web wrapper for MSN.com/weather. You can test this yourself, just open the website in your browser and temporarily disable your ad blocker to take a look at the ads, now open the desktop app, and you can see that the same ads appear in the Weather app.

More than 60 per cent of the world’s population endured extreme heat driven by the climate crisis over nine days in mid-June, according to a new study.

Approximately 5 billion people lived in extreme temperatures that were made at least three times more likely due to the climate crisis.

The study, published by Climate Central, covered the period from 16 to 24 June.

In India, which recorded its longest-ever heatwave this summer, at least 619 million people, over half of the population, experienced severe heat, with maximum temperatures approaching 50C and night-time lows of 37C.

The intense heatwave led to over 40,000 cases of heatstroke and over 100 deaths, according to official figures which are likely an undercount.

China too saw temperatures hitting 50C, the highest-ever recorded in June. Wuhan warned of potential electricity rationing due to increased demand for air conditioning.

In Saudi Arabia, at least 1,300 people died from heat-related illnesses during the Hajj pilgrimage, with temperatures in some cities surpassing 50C.

The US faced back-to-back heatwaves with southern states experiencing temperatures of 52C.

New York saw a 500-600 per cent increase in heat-related emergency visits, with temperatures made up to 2C hotter due to the climate crisis.

The Mediterranean also suffered, with Greece’s Acropolis shutting down after temperatures rose above 43C. Six tourists, including British Tv doctor Michael Mosley, died.

In Egypt, nearly 50C temperatures led to daily power cuts to manage the surge in energy consumption.

The extreme heat extended to the Southern Hemisphere, breaking records in Paraguay and Peru.

Extreme heatwaves that occurred once every 50 years now arrive nearly five times more often and are 1.5C warmer, according to the IPCC, the UN’s panel of top climate scientists.

Every spring, when warm rays of sunshine herald the start of South Korea’s baking summer, fountains across Seoul’s central Gwanghwamun plaza suddenly burst into life, sending cooling jets of water into the air.

In any other city in the world, such an inviting sight would tempt young children to charge through the spray. But in the heart of the Korean capital, shouts of childlike delight are rare.

For a first-time visitor to Korea, there is a gnawing feeling that something is missing. Then it finally dawns – the children.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, reaching new record-breaking troughs every year.

The latest figures show it fell by another 8 per cent in 2023 to 0.72, which is the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime.

For South Korea’s kindergarten teachers, the national dearth of children is already painfully evident and impacting their career prospects.

The country’s record-low birth rates are projected to cause the closure of roughly one-third of daycare centres and kindergartens by 2028, a report by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education warned in January.

This would mean the number of these institutions slipping from 39,053 in 2022 to just 26,637 in 2028, with 12,416 at risk of shutting down.

It’s a situation that London could soon find itself in. In Britain, nurseries are already closing due to government underfunding; babies are also quickly becoming a “luxury item”, says Joeli Brearley, the chief executive and founder of mothers charity Pregnant Then Screwed. “We’re running out of them. It is no surprise to us that fertility rates have hit the floor. We have one of the most expensive childcare sectors in the world, so much so that for three quarters of mothers, it no longer makes financial sense to work. With childcare fees outstripping the cost of housing for more than two thirds of families, almost half of families are borrowing money to pay their childcare bills.”

In England and Wales, the average birth rate declined to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. With its birth rate of just 0.72 children per woman, South Korea’s fertility rate is so critically low that experts predict the population will have halved by the year 2100.

When 31-year-old Dutch farmer Bastiaan Blok dug up his latest crop, the weather had taken a disastrous toll. His onions – 117,000 kilos of them – were the size of shallots.

“We had a very wet spring and a dry, warm summer, so the plants made very small roots,” said Blok, who farms 90 hectares in Swifterbant, in the reclaimed province of Flevoland. “Half of them were less than 40mm and normally at this size they aren’t even processed. We would have probably sold them for very little for biomass, or maybe to Poland for onion oil. It’s either far too wet and cold, or far too warm and dry, and there’s no normal growing period in between.”

The wettest autumn, winter and spring on record have threatened the spinach and potato crops, leading to parliamentary questions and warnings from farming union LTO. Evelien Drenth, LTO agriculture specialist, said 61% of Dutch farmers report lost yields due to extreme weather, diseases are up and sowing is late or sometimes missed. “Consumers and supermarkets need to get used to empty shelves sometimes for short-season crops like spinach … and also irregular-sized Brussels sprouts and broccoli,” she added.

The workweek is about to get a lot longer for some employees in Greece.

Starting July 1, workers in the private sector could be going into the office six days a week—as the 48-hour workweek goes into effect.

Select industrial and manufacturing facilities, along with businesses that provide 24/7 services, are eligible to extend the workweek beyond five days under new labor laws. Food service and tourism workers are not included in the longer workweeks.

The change to the labor laws was approved last September following productivity issues in the country, which have led many workers to put in extra hours and often not be compensated for the time. Officials also note there has been a shortage of skilled workers due to a shrinking population.

Windows 11 is getting out of hand with its push for advertisments, frankly - remember the recent full-screen pop-up to persuade users to install Edge or other Microsoft services? Then another advertisment was placed in the Start menu, and now Microsoft has finally worn my temper thin - with a new Game Pass ad coming to the Settings app.

This will likely arrive in the July update for Windows 11, or at least it’s almost certain to do so. It was present in the latest preview update Microsoft just released for the OS (and quickly paused due to a bug, but that’s another story). It’s also worth noting that the ad has been present in earlier test versions of Windows 11.

Intel sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms.

A Kubuntu Focus developer last week reported a power management issue that breaks scheduling on heterogeneous core Intel systems with buggy firmware. It turns out systems failing to report ACPI CPPC v2 capabilities could lead to very poor performance going all the way back to Linux 5.19. On systems like with an Intel Core i5 13500H and using the EEVDF scheduler, as much as a 50% performance hit could be observed with Geekbench. There have also been other similar bug reports in recent times.

Toronto inhabitants fed up with rising rents are flooding city-run lotteries for affordable housing in new developments, but the chance of being selected for a subsidized unit is often less than 1%.

One new development in the city’s West End recently offered a random public draw to allocate 135 units with rents pegged to income ceilings that would cost hundreds of dollars less than market rates. Nearly 12,500 people entered the draw for the homes aimed at middle-income earners in the Galleria on the Park development.

Rents across Canada rose 9.3% in the year to May to reach C$2,202 (US$1,607), with prices in Toronto averaging C$2,479, according to a recent report.

In comparison a one-bedroom lottery unit in the Galleria on the Park development would cost C$1,589 a month to someone with an annual income of C$82,000.

If it's free then, you're the product

Last July, Google made an eight-word change to its privacy policy that represented a significant step in its race to build the next generation of artificial intelligence.

Buried thousands of words into its document, Google tweaked the phrasing for how it used data for its products, adding that public information could be used to train its A.I. chatbot and other services.

We use publicly available information to help train Google’s language AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

The subtle change was not unique to Google. As companies look to train their A.I. models on data that is protected by privacy laws, they’re carefully rewriting their terms and conditions to include words like “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning” and “generative A.I.”

Those terms and conditions — which many people have long ignored — are now being contested by some users who are writers, illustrators and visual artists and worry that their work is being used to train the products that threaten to replace them.

Archive : https://archive.is/SOe5w

With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

KWin lead developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post about the improved KDE Plasma desktop performance as of Plasma 6.1, which can be especially noticeable with old integrated graphics hardware such as the common Intel graphics in aging laptops. The biggest improvement to bettering the KDE Plasma desktop graphics performance is thanks to dynamic triple buffering support.

Dozens of bodies were discovered in Delhi during a two-day stretch this week when even sundown brought no relief from sweltering heat and humidity. Tourists died or went missing as the mercury surged in Greece. Hundreds of pilgrims perished before they could reach Islam’s holiest site, struck down by temperatures as high as 125° F.

The scorching heat across five continents in recent days, scientists say, provided yet more proof that human-caused global warming has so raised the baseline of normal temperatures that once-unthinkable catastrophes have become commonplace.

‘Exceptional’ heat is arriving sooner and lasting longer

Though not all temperatures seen around the world this week were unprecedented, they were nonetheless evidence of how the climate has shifted in a way that makes hot weather more likely to arrive earlier and last longer.

All week long, “exceptional” conditions could be found across much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and Southeast Asia. Surging air-conditioning demand crippled power grids in Albania and Kuwait. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the past week has seen more than 1,400 high temperature records fall around the globe.

***** Archive : https://archive.is/4p7Wb

Your workplace emails, spreadsheets and files might look a bit different going forward as Google officially rolls out its Gemini AI tools across the Workspace suite.

In a Google Workspace Updates blog post, the company confirmed the general availability of Gemini as a new side panel across popular apps including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive - however only paying Google Workspace customers will be able to access it for the time being.

The company says this new AI-powered update should help users everywhere unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency, as well as introducing Gemini to millions of users across the world in the battle for AI supremacy.

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This is terrible since Google has millions of user data.