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Essex Police investigate reported assault on man in his 20s at Warrior Square, Southend, on September 18; paramedics treated his injuries.

Essex Police investigate reported assault on man in his 20s at Warrior Square, Southend, on September 18; paramedics treated his injuries.

Tim inherited a fairly antique Visual Basic application some time back. Yes, Visual Basic, not VB .Net. The application is old enough that we might consider it "vintage" or "historical"; it certainly dates from before the millennium. But it has its own unique approach to handling historical dates:

mnYear% = CInt(Year(vntDate)) If mnYear% < 1000 Then msYear$ = "0" & Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) Else msYear$ = Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) End If

Insert obligatory complaints about Hungarian notation. What even is vnt.

Now, one important thing about this program: it didn't have to handle dates back into the middle ages, or honestly, historical dates at all. But someone decided they wanted to make sure that if someone wanted to track the founding of the Tang Dynasty in here, you could make sure it was padded out to four digits.

Unfortunately, if you wanted to track, say, the death of Caesar Augustus in 14AD, that'll only pad out to "014", which raises the question: what even is the point of this padding? And how many pre-1000 dates did the program handle? The answer to both questions is "none". Later code reformatted the date anyway, using the built in date types, even.

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Rooney is now an established Match of Day pundit and impressed with his forthright views during the summer's World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

A plan for 2,850 homes requires a link road through land that the owners are refusing to sell

OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials." The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I. safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI's systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information. "Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused on A.I. oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI," the article points out. That research lab even reports "an attempt on an Australian government public health website... the first reported instance of agents hacking a government," and which notably was done by the AI agents "while attempting mundane data retrieval tasks which were not cyber-related." (At the UN Wednesday Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained it took three months for OpenAI to then alert Australia's government about the breach, Bloomberg reports.) Also targeted were the University of New Mexico's digital library with exploits like SQL injection and path traversal, and Data USA with cross-site scripting and other exploits. All three incidents involved "a low number of probe payloads" with "no evidence of exploitation," according to the researchers, who released a dataset "containing tens of thousands of queries apparently made by autonomous AI agents leveraging a URL scanning service to avoid access restrictions." Records from urlquery.net show agents using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as September 16... By March, they were finding creative ways around access limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks. "This data reveals that malicious cyber activity is not limited to agents tasked with cybersecurity-related tasks and can arise instrumentally to solve mundane tasks like information retrieval," the researchers concluded. And they warn that the traffic they observed "goes back at least to March 6, 2026 and extends as recently as September 16, 2026, suggesting agents may still be exploiting these services to bypass restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RIPE NCC hopes members get aboard effort to tidy things up and give its CEO a vote

Dapper Brad Pitt put on a loved-up display with his stunning girlfriend Ines de Ramon at a photocall for his new film Heart of the Beast on Wednesday night.

Just after we took out our first mortgage in summer 2024, interest rates started to drop. I thought I'd made a terrible mistake - but now I can see I didn't.

They say the chance to "create some stories and memories" has been "ripped away"

Cineworld Basildon seeks approval for 24-hour film screenings and late-night refreshments at Festival Leisure Park. Comments due by September 23.

Cineworld Basildon seeks approval for 24-hour film screenings and late-night refreshments at Festival Leisure Park. Comments due by September 23.

Kristoffer Von Hassel was once a celebrity across the world after discovering a glitch on his father's Xbox, but now his name is in the news again for the wrong reasons.

Thomas was arrested, transported, and booked on chares of obstruction and public intoxication at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station.

There is no painless way to fix Britain's welfare system. Welfare should be a safety net for those in genuine need. It is not meant to be a comfortable option for people who can work, but choose not to.

Danny Nozell, who managed Parton for over 20 years, took out a temporary restraining order against Bryan Seaver, who served as the singer's security chief.

Tesco groceries launch nationwide on Deliveroo, offering UK shoppers delivery in as little as 20 minutes across 75 towns and cities, with Clubcard Prices.

Tesco groceries launch nationwide on Deliveroo, offering UK shoppers delivery in as little as 20 minutes across 75 towns and cities, with Clubcard Prices.

Software product development industry shrinks a little, but if AI has dented prospects, it’s not in these numbers

The Milan Fashion Week Fendi show proved to be a star-studded affair on Wednesday night.