Clarifications and corrections
An article in the first edition of last week's Mail on Sunday said that Catherine Atkinson MP was privately educated. In fact, Ms Atkinson has never attended private school. We apologise...
People Keep Sneaking Into an Empty IBM Campus - and Then Getting Arrested
Since February, New York state police have arrested 48 people for trespassing on a former IBM campus in Somers, New York, reports the Wall Street Journal. 30 of the arrests were teenagers.
The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach... [I]t's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring still more curiosity seekers... In Somers, social-media images of the old IBM campus — a sprawling, pyramid-studded 1980s complex designed by the late I.M. Pei's firm — show dystopian scenes: busted windows, tossed rooms and graffitied walls. But they also give eerie glimpses of conference rooms and cubicles unchanged since IBM left a decade ago, as if employees had fled the daily grind one day and never returned...
One man in his mid-20s faces felony charges; police allege he had a loaded 9mm gun and took a Sony camera and power strip among other souvenirs. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said "a 15-second clip" isn't worth a criminal record... Proto said he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Somers town court clerk said some defendants received a 6-month "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," meaning charges will be dropped and their arrest sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe-and-preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces and a zeal to document discoveries — and that they're careful and know their limits.
"It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble," says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer and author of the book "Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City," about his own urbex adventures. He sees urban exploration as "a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes, into intellectual curiosity about history and culture." But Garrett said popular spots can be "loved to death" online — and then shut down, looted or set ablaze.
"Trespassers were blamed for a March 30 fire, reports a local newspaper, "that damaged one of the buildings and required volunteer firefighters to spend three hours extinguishing the blaze."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ellie Goulding surprises England fans with pre-match performance in Miami Stadium ahead of quarter-final World Cup game against Norway
Ellie Goulding surprised England fans in Miami Stadium on Saturday night as she put on an epic pre-match performance.
Revealed: The four England stars at risk of suspension for World Cup semi-final ahead of Norway clash
Thomas Tuchel's are preparing for a meeting with Erling Haaland & Co in Miami on Saturday night, and should the team gain a substantial lead, a place in the final four.
Ann Widdecombe's tragic final texts are revealed as messages show exactly when she stopped replying before her 'murder' at Dartmoor home
Former cabinet minister Ann Widdecombe was engaged in conversation with a researcher on Channel 5's Matt Alwright show when her messages suddenly stopped without explanation.
How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction
For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks.
How are they fighting back?
We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of smart TVs running some sort of compromised app... We got confirmation that at least some of the botnet traffic hitting GNU Savannah was originating through the Vo1d/Popa botnet.
We placed our regular expressions in fail2ban, and found that we were hitting the maximum rules that could be added to UFW firewall rules on our systems which showed degradation around 65,000 rules... We learned about ipset and configured fail2ban to add IP addresses that it found to IP sets. Using ipset, we kept building larger IP sets and did not find instability with as large as five million rules...
We eventually found a promising project on Framasoft's forge Framagit called reaction written by ppom... After we ran into scaling issues with our initial implementation, we developed a much faster implementation where the reaction shutdown process would export the IP sets to disk and the reaction startup process would restore the IP sets. This allowed us to have nearly instantaneous restarts of the service to apply new rules. We published both of our configurations upstream to reaction's wiki so that everyone can benefit from it. reaction's getting started documentation now leads to the method that we proposed...
Many sysadmins know about fail2ban, but not enough people know about reaction. I am very grateful to ppom for the help they have provided and for the tremendous project they have released to the world with reaction. We have implemented other defenses as well, but reaction is doing the majority of the automated work keeping our sites online.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amy Schumer shows off weight loss in bikini as she reveals why she's a 'warrior'... after going viral for slamming Taylor Swift's wedding
The 45-year-old Trainwreck star took to her Instagram on Friday to share a snap of herself in a tiny white bikini.
Colombia star 'goes into hiding' after receiving death threats over costly World Cup miss... 32 years on from chilling murder of former defender
Colombian forward Jaminton Campaz reportedly did not return home to Colombia with the rest of the team following the nation's World Cup elimination amid concerns for his life.
Waitrose bows to pressure from the trans lobby as upmarket supermarket axes 'feminine' from its period products aisle signs
The chain announced plans to reword its sanitary hygiene signs to the gender-neutral term 'period care' after receiving criticism that 'not all people who have periods are women'.
How Madonna joined Evita crew's laundry bills protest
Documents reveal Madonna shocked producers of her 1996 film Evita by joining the crew's protest against paying half their laundry bills.
ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: A heavenly evening - but one thing was missing!
Smoking is famously hard to give up. It's the most pernicious of habits. But I've been fortunate: over these last two years, I've hardly had a moment's difficulty in sticking to my new non-smoking life.
DuckDuckGo's Browser Now Blocks Most YouTube Ads
Nerds.xyz reports:
DuckDuckGo just gave its browser a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. The privacy-focused browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, letting users watch videos without sitting through the pre-roll and mid-roll interruptions that have become part of everyday life on the platform. The feature is already enabled by default for iPhone, Windows, and Mac users running the latest version of the browser. Android users can turn it on manually... with DuckDuckGo planning to enable it by default in a future update...
To make it work, DuckDuckGo relies on the same community-maintained filter lists used by uBlock Origin, along with some of its own compatibility rules. The company says you might notice a bit of extra buffering before a video starts, but once playback begins, most ads should be gone.
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli argues that the feature raises questions about how creators are compensated when ad revenue is bypassed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ken Bates dead at 94: Amazing life of controversial former Chelsea owner who saved the club, almost signed Graeme Souness, used to phone me up to rant about Todd Boehly and labelled Leeds fans 'morons'
Bates, who famously bought the west London football club for just £1 in 1982, passed away peacefully in Monaco on Saturday morning surrounded by his wife and family.
Bournemouth's Alex Jimenez joins Fiorentina on loan amid investigation into alleged messages with 15-year-old girl
Bournemouth defender Alex Jimenez has joined Serie A club Fiorentina on a season-long loan amid an investigation into allegations he sent inappropriate messages to a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
Investigation launched after car drives through stone wall and plunges 300ft onto rocks at popular beauty spot
Emergency services were called to Great Orme at Llandudno on Saturday morning after walkers on the beach heard the car fall from the headland's limestone cliffs.
England must beat the heat AND Erling Haaland with Thomas Tuchel's side hit by sweltering 44 DEGREE Miami conditions after fears World Cup quarter final with Norway would be delayed
A major heat risk has been declared in South Florida with temperatures said to be rising to 29-32°C - with a realfeel of up to 44°C - by the time today's game is due to kick off at 5pm in Miami (10pm UK time).
Brad Pitt FINALLY gets a kiss from Ines de Ramon at World Cup after she was accused of 'pulling away from him'
Pitt, 62, and de Ramon, 33, who were first linked in 2022, went Instagram official last week in snaps of the outfits they wore to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding.
Four teenagers are charged after woman 'raped' at house in seaside town
Avon and Somerset Police were alerted to reports of the woman being threatened and raped in Weston-Super-Mare on June 21.
Legendary BBC commentator announces shock retirement on air - following BBC's decision to axe Andrew Castle after 23 years
John Lloyd, the BBC's tennis commentator, was calling the men's doubles final on Centre Court on Saturday as Henry Patten and Harri Heliovaara's defeated Marcelo Arevalo and Mate Pavic.
Linda Noskova WINS Wimbledon: Czech star finally clinches Grand Slam after spurning FIVE championship points in SW19 thriller - and emotionally thanks her mother two years after her tragic death
RIATH AL-SAMARRAI AT WIMBLEDON: After two hours and 27 minutes, Linda Noskova buried her face between her knees and wept the tears of a Wimbledon champion.