Please consider donating to help rescue hedgehogs this summer

Hoggieworts Hedgehog Helpers is a small, home-based, non-profit Rescue in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, dedicated to saving, caring for and rehabilitating wild European hedgehogs before safely releasing them back into the wild.

We’re raising funds to install air conditioning into our foster care facility, ensuring our rescued hedgehogs stay safe, healthy and comfortable, especially during the warmer months.

If you would like to support our work, any donation would make a huge difference. Please use the reference The QC-AC so we can ensure your contribution goes directly towards this vital project. Thank you so much for any help you are able to give.

Rob & Keri are very dear friends of ours. They've ploughed thousands of pounds of their own money into this incredible non-profit. They are truly passionate about doing whatever they can to protect these beautiful little creatures. Please click on the above image to find out how you can support their work - thank you!

One million people have mapped their mobile – have you?

A million people have flocked to Map Your Mobile, a free mobile checker, to help avoid dropped calls, sluggish data and patchy signal, Ofcom has revealed today.

Ofcom’s mobile checker service lets users enter their postcode to get a map of which networks are available in that particular area, alongside a score showing which company performs best in their postal district. You can check your coverage in seconds at ofcom.org.uk/mobile.  

It allows anyone to see which mobile network is best where they live, work or travel, helping people choose the right provider before signing up or switching, so they can get the best possible value for money from their contract.

With mobile phones now essential for everything from banking to booking GP appointments, it’s become a must-use consumer tool.

www.ofcom.org.uk

MPs call for review on motorcycle road tax

Led by Bromsgrove MP Bradley Thomas and countersigned by 26 other members of parliament, the letter to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves asks for an ‘urgent review’ on the way in which Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) is worked out for bikes.

Currently road tax is calculated by engine capacity, with a year’s road tax for small capacity bikes (up to 150cc) costing £27, rising in brackets up to £125 per year for machines over 600cc. The group argues that motorcycles are among the lightest and least damaging vehicles on public roads, and that using engine size is not the correct way to calculate tax – especially as cars are assessed on CO2 emissions and heavy goods vehicles on their weight and impact on road wear.

The letter, which is signed by six former cabinet members, including hardcore motorcyclist Steve Barclay, MP for North East Cambridgeshire, argues that ‘… the current system is anomalous within the Government’s own framework. VED for cars is linked to environmental performance. VED for HGVs reflects road impact. VED for motorcycles reflects neither. Engine size is not a reliable indicator of emissions, road damage or mileage, and its continued use as sole determinant of motorcycle VED lacks a coherent policy rationale.’

My bike weighs 200Kg, and takes up the space of a quarter of a car. As we can & do filter - motorcyclists have much less road space impact compared to any sort of 4 wheeled car. Yet - for road tax - I pay as much as & in many cases more than a car. Robbers! 

www.carolenash.com

Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise

Every Artificial Intelligence lab is losing money serving your company right now. They know it. And they are doing it on purpose.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the rest are running an industry-wide loss-leader program at a scale that has no precedent. They are selling enterprises filet mignon at gas station hot dog prices and calling it a business model. The gap between what your company pays for AI subscriptions and what it actually costs to serve those seats is not a rounding error. It is a gulf. And every organization that has built workflows, products, or entire business units on top of these subsidized prices is standing right on the edge of it.

This should be front of mind for every CTO, CFO, and head of operations reading this. Because when the pricing corrects, and it will, the companies that treated AI as a permanently cheap utility are going to wake up to bills that make their current SaaS spend look quaint.

www.thestateofbrand.com

A reading for today: God the builder, or architect

I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

By C. S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

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

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