Remove wired cable barriers from England's highways

Cable barriers, particularly the posts that hold them, present a danger to motorcyclists. Due to these upright posts with protruding parts and jagged edges, they are more likely to seriously injure or kill motorcyclists. 

Northern Ireland has recognised this threat and is currently in the process of removing their remaining cable barriers, while countries such as Norway have banned their use. Their removal will improve road safety outcomes for motorcyclists – a vulnerable road user group.

We are calling for the removal of 143 miles of cable barriers still present on England's strategic road network by the end of the decade. Replacing them with a standard guardrails and or/concrete as is appropriate for the given road environment. Please sign this petition to remove this danger from our roads - thank you!

www.change.org

Computer Misuse Act reform to move forward in National Security Bill

The long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years – is to be included in a new National Security Bill.

Announced today by King Charles III in his speech at the State Opening of Parliament, the National Security Bill is chiefly designed to make the UK a harder target for hostile foreign states and other dangerous groups to attack.

It comes partly in response to the 2024 Southport terror attack, and more recent incidents targeting Britain’s Jewish community, and will create offences around creating and disseminating harmful material online, and according to Westminster will close gaps within the nation’s state threats legislation and align it more closely with anti-terror laws.

Ultimately, the stated goal is to enhance the UK’s ability to counter the full spectrum of threats ranged against the UK by enhancing the powers available to law enforcement and the security services.

The government said that by reforming the legal cyber landscape within this, cyber cops will gain updated powers and capabilities to “remain effective in the digital age”.

It intends to create a Cyber Crime Risk Order that can be applied to control the behaviour of cyber criminals, and new abilities to search people believed to be concealing evidence on behalf of suspected offenders.

“It will also unlock the power of cyber security professionals to better enable them to secure computer systems. It will also seek to tackle the pervasive threat to the UK economy and businesses, posed by ruthless cyber criminals,” said the government.

www.computerweekly.com

Double U, Double U, Double U - Eh?...

 

Viz says: When giving a web address, why do people insist on saying the letters `www', with 3 syllables per letter? What they stand for — World Wide Web — is six syllables shorter!

The World Wide Web (also known as WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is a global interconnected information system that enables content sharing over the Internet. It facilitates access to documents and other web resources according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through a character string called uniform resource locator (URL).

Don sez: "Often us techies refer to it as dub-dub-dub - often non techies look blankly at us!"

www.wikipedia.org

Beer Day Britain is almost here: June 15th!

 

Beer Day Britain is an annual celebration on June 15th for all beer lovers and it celebrates all beer including traditional ales, mainstream lagers, and limited edition craft beer – with alcohol and with no alcohol – and everything in between no matter where it is brewed or who owns the brewing company.

June 15th is significant because that is also the date Magna Carta was sealed in 1215. The great charter mentions ale in Article 35: ‘Let there be throughout our kingdom a single measure for wine and a single measure for ale and a single measure for corn…..’

Ale was so important in England in 1215 that it was cited in one of the most significant legal documents in history.  Today beer and pubs are still central to British life and seven out of 10 drinks sold in a pub are beer.

Britain has a dynamic brewing scene and an unmatched heritage in spreading the love and knowledge of beer around the world.  More styles of beer first brewed in Britain are now brewed overseas than those of any other brewing nation. These include India Pale Ale, Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Imperial Russian Stout, Mild, Bitter, Barley Wine, Brown Ale, and Scotch Ale. READ MORE & Cheers!

https://www.beerdaybritain.co.uk/

The biggest AI companies are racing to replace humans. A different, better path is possible.

AI should serve people, not replace them. Humans must stay in meaningful control of powerful systems. The benefits should be broadly shared. Today we're publishing the roadmap for how that actually gets implemented: A Better Path is out now.

The Declaration established the principles. A Better Path offers the framework - technical, legal, and political - for moving from those principles to tangible structures. It addresses the questions the Declaration left open: What does "meaningful human control" require, technically? How should liability attach to systems? What governance mechanisms can actually prevent a race to uncontrollable AI? What does a viable international coordination path look like?

The framework builds directly on the Declaration's five pillars and translates them into:

• An autonomy-responsibility framework that creates market incentives for controllable tools over autonomous agents.
• A tiered assurance system that scales oversight requirements with capability and risk.
• A compute governance approach that closes the path to superintelligence while leaving beneficial AI development wide open.
• A clear vision of Tool AI - capable, economically competitive, and under genuine human control - that shows the alternative is real.

Donline is a signatory of The Declaration. I highly recommend that you read more and stay aware of this existential threat to humanity. Let's do our bit to ensure that Artificial Intelligence remains our servant - not the other way round. 

www.betterpathfor.ai

A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed - until residents complained about low water pressure

The neighbors of a data center in Georgia are steaming after they discovered the data centre facility had sucked up nearly 30 million gallons of water — without initially paying for it.

Outrage started bubbling up last year when residents of an affluent subdivision named Annelise Park in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed their water pressure was unusually low.

When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.

All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.

www.politico.com

TKC - Thy Kingdom Come 2026: God With Us

 

Thy Kingdom Come is a global ecumenical prayer movement that invites Christians around the world to pray for more people to come to know Jesus. What started in 2016 as an invitation from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to the Church of England has grown into an international and ecumenical call to prayer. This year TLC runs from Thursday 14th May (Ascension) till Sunday 24th May (Pentecost).

This year’s Thy Kingdom Come is all about the presence of God through His spirit.

The God who is with us in the everyday – in the joys and sorrows of life (and everything in between) and the One who, through His spirit, longs to reveal Himself to those who do not yet know Him.

From the story of Ruth to the story of Gideon, from the story of Elijah to the story of the early church who waited for the promised Holy Spirit to come- over the 11 days we will explore a different Bible story each day, which demonstrates God’s transformative presence, power and love at work in the lives of people and places.

Our hope is that as we pray for our five people, they will also experience the life-changing love of God and choose to follow Him.

www.thykingdomcome.global