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

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

 

Alexander Hanff Writes: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device! Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request.

Wow! Remember when the Internet blew up because Apple automatically downloaded a free U2 Album? I actually bought that album "Songs of Innocence" It's great - I'm listening to it now! It was a tiny download - which if you weren't a fan could simply delete. Still, loads of folks got in a mighty strop about that. ^^^ THIS is a big deal!!! Not cool Google, not cool! I'm waiting to see who is going to get their knickers in a knot over this huge download - which will affect most folks who have Google Chrome installed...

www.thatprivacyguy.com

Donline's Blog - almost at 700,000 hits!

 

Wow - this Blog is almost at 700,000 hits. 

Who's gonna be the closest to the magic number?

Send me a screenshot of your counter. 

Closest gets a lovely Donline Waiter's Friend!

If you get the actual 700,000 - its a merch goodie bag!

Thanks & Blessings, Don :0)

blog.donline.co.uk