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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems. Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away. "The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot," Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. "It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people's PCs can't handle it and they can't play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things." Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won't completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot's low-level system access were "some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating." [...] Despite all these justifications for the Secure Boot requirement on EA's part, it hasn't been hard to find people complaining about what they see as an onerous barrier to playing an online shooter. A quick Reddit search turns up dozens of posts complaining about the difficulty of getting Secure Boot on certain PC configurations or expressing discomfort about installing what they consider a "malware rootkit" on their machine. "I want to play this beta but A) I'm worried about bricking my PC. B) I'm worried about giving EA complete access to my machine," one representative Redditor wrote.

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DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Rayner saved £40,000 of stamp duty by removing her name from the deeds of her constituency house in Ashton-under-Lyne.

Robin Westman, 23, had only recently broken up with a romantic partner before killing two children in the horrific attack, his father James has revealed.

America has waited 22 years for another homegrown player to win the men's singles. After a grim afternoon, it's only Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul still standing.

Your stars for this week by Jemima Cainer

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce broke the internet this week when they announced their engagement.

The university launched a 90-day consultation in April outlining its proposals to cut 356 positions from its workforce, including the removal of 98 vacant job posts. Now, staff are set to work out over the plans.

The Home Office and Somani Hotels, which owns the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, today successfully overturned a High Court ruling ordering them to remove all 138 residents.

Ashley Roberts sent temperatures soaring as she shared a series of sizzling bikini-clad film snaps from her sun-soaked holiday in Turkey on Friday. 

The Conservatives have lodged a formal request for an investigation into whether the Deputy Prime Minister broke the ministerial code in her purchase of an £800,000 second home.

More than a dozen defiant councils are still planning on taking legal action against the Government despite the Home Office winning an appeal against the closure of an asylum seeker hotel in Epping. 

Reuters has found that Meta appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission. "While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift 'parody' bots." From the report: Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. "Pretty cute, huh?" the avatar wrote beneath the picture. All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots' behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups. Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risque: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta's AI tools shouldn't have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta's production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company's enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content. "Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery," he said. While Meta's rules also prohibit "direct impersonation," Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren't. Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both "parody" avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story's publication.

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Despite coming from a typical healthy family, Robin Westman's horrific decision to shoot up a Minneapolis church full of children was inspired by online terror groups who exploit young people.

JONATHAN MCEVOY AT ZANDVOORT: Next to the beach at wind-tossed Zandvoort, the seven-time world champion spun twice in Friday's practice sessions.

A statue of the Virgin Mary is seen riddled with bullet holes, turning a once beautiful symbol of faith and hope into a reminder of the horror that unfolded at the Annunciation Catholic Church.

Mary Grace Westman, 67, raced to leave the beach city of Naples on Wednesday, before FBI agents were filmed arriving at her condo hoping to speak with her, Daily Mail can reveal.

Rizwan Khan, 40, was also found guilty of sexually assaulting one of his victims and slapping a child across the face, in separate incidents.

Linus Torvalds updated the kernel's MAINTAINERS file to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained," signaling he won't accept new Bcachefs pull requests for now. "MAINTAINERS: mark bcachefs externally maintained," wrote Torvalds with the patch. "As per many long discussion threads, public and private." "The Bcachefs code is still present in the mainline Linux kernel likely to prevent users from having any immediate fall-out in Bcachefs file-systems they may already be using, but it doesn't look like Linus Torvalds will be honoring any new Bcachefs pull requests in the near future," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel.

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Furious American makes jibe referencing the notorious Cincinnati brawl after being berated by a white fellow traveler.

Shortly after Robin Westman opened fire on a Catholic school mass packed with children, the shooter's shocking manifestos spread across internet - leaving a trail of puzzling clues behind.