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Today's commemoration of Victory in Japan - VJ Day - at the National Memorial Arboretum, attended by the King and the Prime Minister, will be a poignant occasion, of course.

Rising subscription costs, shrinking content libraries, and regional restrictions are pushing viewers back toward piracy. Once seen as nearly dead, piracy has resurged through illicit streaming platforms as the fractured, ad-laden streaming market struggles to deliver convenience and value. The Guardian reports: According to London-based piracy monitoring and content-protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023 (PDF). Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn (PDF). In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed (PDF) reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag. "Piracy is not a pricing issue," Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world's largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. "It's a service issue." Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance. Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way. As the streaming landscape fractures into feudal territories, more viewers are turning to the high seas. The Medici understood the value linked to access. [The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance.] A client could travel from Rome to London and still draw on their credit, thanks to a network built on trust and interoperability. If today's studios want to survive the storm, they may need to rediscover that truth.

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A GREAT actor can make us care about almost anybody. But Lily Allen, in her latest stage venture at Bath's tiny Ustinov Studio, has to cope with one of the dodgiest characters in all of drama.

YouTuber George Clarke was yesterday announced as the sixth celebrity contestant for Strictly 2025. But his showbiz roots go deeper than his online personality.

Anthony Cummins reviews the best Literary Fiction out now.

Jamie Buxton reviews the best Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels out now.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has cited 'grave concern' over multiple allegations that Palestinian prisoners have been subjected to degrading treatment in prisons.

Sitting on the side of my bed is the man I have just had sex with. Totally naked, his muscled torso glistens, his six-pack in contrast to my own more Rubenesque form.

Meghan Reinertsen, 29, from Atlanta, Georgia, spoke with the Daily Mail about her nightmare experience on board a United Airlines plane from Newark to Indianapolis.

Rebecca, a pupil at Kelvinside Academy, is one of nine girls from around the world whose inspiration and influence have earned them a mention in the prestigious publication.

Benedict Osborne, 52, was clocked speeding on the busy Westway Flyover in Hammersmith and Fulham, west London on July 29, 2024, Lavender Hill Magistrates Court was told.

He is the ninth toy signed in an open-walleted summer for the Welsh side, who want to make a serious impression in the Championship after three consecutive promotions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has announced a tiny version of its Gemma open model designed to run on local devices. Google says the new Gemma 3 270M can be tuned in a snap and maintains robust performance despite its small footprint. [...] Running an AI model locally has numerous benefits, including enhanced privacy and lower latency. Gemma 3 270M was designed with these kinds of use cases in mind. In testing with a Pixel 9 Pro, the new Gemma was able to run 25 conversations on the Tensor G4 chip and use just 0.75 percent of the device's battery. That makes it by far the most efficient Gemma model. Developers shouldn't expect the same performance level of a multi-billion-parameter model, but Gemma 3 270M has its uses. Google used the IFEval benchmark, which tests a model's ability to follow instructions, to show that its new model punches above its weight. Gemma 3 270M hits a score of 51.2 percent in this test, which is higher than other lightweight models that have more parameters. The new Gemma falls predictably short of 1 billion-plus models like Llama 3.2, but it gets closer than you might think for having just a fraction of the parameters. Google claims Gemma 3 270M is good at following instructions out of the box, but it expects developers to fine-tune the model for their specific use cases. Due to the small parameter count, that process is fast and low-cost, too. Google sees the new Gemma being used for tasks like text classification and data analysis, which it can accomplish quickly and without heavy computing requirements. You can download the new Gemma for free, and the model weights are available. There's no separate commercial licensing agreement, so developers can modify, publish, and deploy Gemma 3 270M derivatives in their tools. You can download Gemma 3 270M from Hugging Face and Kaggle in both pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions.

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The eyes of the world will be on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, where the two men are due meet at 8.30pm UK time on Friday.

Some custom malware, some legit software tools

At least a dozen ransomware gangs have incorporated kernel-level EDR killers into their malware arsenal, allowing them to bypass almost every major endpoint security tool on the market, escalate privileges, and ultimately steal and encrypt data before extorting victims into paying a ransom.…

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway quietly built a stake in a struggling company over the past two quarters, a regulatory filing shows.

It comes shortly after Katie, 47, urged Peter, 52, to take part in peace talks as their daughter Princess has been 'unfairly' dragged into their feud.

More reported cases of a grotesque virus leaving rabbits across the US deformed is sparking fears that the condition is spreading nationwide this summer.

Rachel Brosnahan's husband has raised eyebrows after 'liking' an Instagram comment criticizing her on-screen chemistry with Superman costar David Corenswet.

The 35-year-old billionaire pop star previously name-dropped the late Hollywood screen siren in her 2017 hit song, ...Ready for It