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Come with us through the gates of Jenkins Land to admire the Java dinosaurs within

DevOps World Lisbon Love was in the air at the CloudBees-sponsored DevOps World in Lisbon this week as the 900 or so attendees were treated to public displays of affection with Google both on stage and behind the scenes.…

We’re in a climate emergency and using more plastic than ever before. Oil companies are investing more money to produce more and more trash we can’t get rid of or recycle. The time to act is now – the need has never been more urgent and retailers can’t make the changes alone.

Plastics pollution is a big issue for voters. In recent polling, 75% of the British public now believe that single-use plastic products should be banned as soon as possible.

All the UK political parties vying for votes in the general election have now launched their manifestos. Here’s what they have to say on tackling the worsening plastic problem.

Brexit

The Brexit party make vague commitments to recycle and ban waste exports. They give no dates and no plans, so they don’t present a viable proposal for reducing plastics in the future.

Conservative

The Conservative party suggest some good policies but do not go nearly far enough. They talk about banning waste exports to non-OECD countries. But, as Unearthed discovered, 62% of the waste we export goes to OECD countries like Poland and Turkey anyway. These countries also have weaker labour rights, so it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They also missed an opportunity to back a proper “all in” deposit return scheme, one which accepts all sizes and types of plastics. Most importantly, have no real plan to reduce the amount of plastic we use in the first place.

Their main strength is that they plan to make producers of plastic waste (including supermarkets) financially responsible for cleaning it up. This will relieve the unfair burden placed on local councils and create incentives for manufacturers to use more packaging that can be recycled.

Green

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Green party’s plastic plans are the most ambitious, including a pledge to ban single-use plastic entirely in the long term. Most helpful, however, is their promise to tackle plastic production – truly meeting the problem at its climate-damaging source.

In general, they think more holistically than any other party about our use of natural resources and their proposals are most in line with what’s needed to tackle the climate emergency.

Labour

The Labour party have some good policies. What sets them apart is that they have actually promised specific funds (£4.5 billion to be exact) for recycling infrastructure. This is what the UK desperately needs and which they hope will reduce the amount of waste dumped on other countries.

They also want to “encourage sustainable design and manufacturing processes”. This is great for a plastic when its production has huge environmental impacts, but Labour give no details about how they would like this to happen.

They don’t present a real plan to reduce our production or use of plastic. They also fail to mention plans to usher in a revolution in reusable, refillable and packaging-free products. Their proposed grants for local authority “reuse centres”, though important, refer to reuse at the end of a products life, not designing it for reuse in the first place.

Liberal Democrat

The Liberal Democrats have committed to legally binding plastic reduction targets, a Zero Waste and Resource Efficiency Act and a deposit return scheme for all types of containers. They didn’t come out on top in our overall manifesto rankings, but in this area they are to be commended. Plastic use is going up, and we need long term plans set in law to tackle it.

The only negative point was failing to be specific about whether producers of waste would be held responsible for cleaning it up. This needs to be in any law passed to deal with plastic pollution.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru want to ban single-use plastics by 2030, which is far more in line with the public mood than some of the other parties. It’s their long-term ambition to make Wales zero-waste by 2030 – an ambition that should be mirrored by the government in Westminster.

The only area in which they fall down is failing to be specific about what kind of deposit scheme they would like to introduce. Also concerning is their idea of encouraging the development of “sustainable alternatives” to plastic. The best alternative is rarely (if ever) switching to another material, but to a reusable, refillable or packaging-free solution.

Scottish National Party

The SNP have been light on plans to tackle plastic pollution at a systemic level. They have committed to some great ideas – an “all in” deposit return scheme and a charge aimed at reducing the use of plastic cups – and are currently introducing them into law in Scotland. But many of their plastic policies are simply requirements of the European Union’s single-use plastic directive. This includes bans on plastic plates, cutlery, straws and cotton buds, for example.

That’s the rundown of what promises political parties are making to tackle the problem of plastic pollution. See how the party manifestos measure up on the climate and nature emergency.

The post Where do the political parties stand on ending plastic pollution? appeared first on Greenpeace UK.

Too soon for New Year Resolutions?

Cybercriminals will continue to exploit tried-and-tested fraud methods but also adopt a couple of new takes and targets in the year ahead.…

Great job, now let's do some applied AI with the big boys

Mustafa Suleyman, one of the founders of DeepMind, is to join Google's applied AI division.…

How the worst mobe I ever used maimed an American teen

Comment Earlier this year, I reviewed arguably the worst phone I've ever used in eight years of covering tech for a living: the Doogee S40. I've always prided myself on my fairness, but I genuinely couldn't find a silver lining to this appalling waste of rare-earth metals. It had a crap screen, a weak camera, and was frustratingly slow to use.…

Behold the 'heaving monstrosity of pulsing evil'

On Call Friday has arrived once again with a tale from the smouldering world of On Call.…

All you need is tens of thousands of Lego bricks, a Raspberry Pi, and a laptop GPU

An engineer has built something that is sure to be the envy of any self-respecting Lego fan: an AI-powered Lego sorting machine.…

Sign up, tune in, expand your knowledge, and compete in hacking contests

Promo On December 9, SANS will launch its second annual KringleCon virtual conference followed shortly thereafter by its 13th Holiday Hack Challenge.…

OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2/IPSec also vulnerable to unmasking flaw, we're told

A bug in the way Unix-flavored systems handle TCP connections could put VPN users at risk of having their encrypted traffic hijacked, it is claimed.…

Riding the chip lead that he came to the final table with, Bulgaria’s Milen Stefanov earned a few firsts at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Wednesday night. First, he earned his first major championship in winning the World Poker Tour’s Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open. Second, Stefanov gave his home country their first ever WPT champion, surprising in that it hadn’t occurred before in the 18 years of the WPT.

Come and Get Him!

Stefanov was sitting atop the standings at the start of action on Wednesday, but it was a tenuous lead. Holding just under nine million chips (8.925 million, to be exact), Stefanov had to fend off some tough competition. World Series of Poker bracelet winner Roman Korenev was right behind him with an 8.175 million stack, while three other players – Cesar Fuentes (7.55 million chips), David Novosel (7.525 million) and Fabian Gumz (5.15 million) – were packed tightly in pursuit of the top two. The short stack at the table, Francis Anderson, still had a formidable stack of 2.175 million, just enough to be a threat to any stack that wanted to try to take him out.

Stefanov came out of the gate firing, benefitted by some good cards and good fortune. On the fourth hand of action, Anderson would get his short stack to the center and Stefanov would look him up. Holding pocket sevens, Stefanov had an edge over Anderson’s K♦ Q♦ pre-flop, but that would disappear once Anderson caught a Queen on the turn after a 10-6-2 flop. With a 5% chance of winning the hand (two sevens), Stefanov would miraculously hit a seven on the river to steal the hand back from Anderson and send him to the rail in sixth place.

While players would pull close to him and even pass him for a brief moment, Stefanov would always find a way back to the lead. He knocked out Fuentes in fifth place, his Big Slick in clubs reigning supreme over Fuentes’ Q-10 off suit on an A-8-7-J-4 board. He then would take down Korenev in fourth place when his pocket Aces never were challenged by Korenev’s Q♠ 10♠.

Train Kept ‘a Rollin’

Dominating with three players to go, Stefanov didn’t let his foot off the gas. With a J-10-2-10-6 in front of them, Novosel and Stefanov locked horns in a hand that would see Novosel end up on the short end of the stick. After seeing Stefanov shove enough chips to require Novosel to call for his tournament life, Novosel made that choice and was dismayed to see Stefanov turn up J-10 for the flopped two pair and the turned full house. Novosel disgustedly turned up only a K-6 that had rivered a crushed two pair, tens and sixes, which earned him a trip to the cage for his third-place effort.

Stefanov began heads up play with Gumz with more than a 5:1 lead (33.275 million – 6.225 million), but Gumz would prove to be a formidable opponent. It would take 50 hands for Stefanov to vanquish Gumz, which came when Stefanov shoved off the button and Gumz read him for a steal attempt. Stefanov had at least an Ace with his A-2, massively better than Gumz’s Q-8 off suit, but his cards were live as they went to the flop.

An Ace on the flop (A-J-5) nearly ended any drama, but the “poker gods” had to give a sweat by throwing a Queen up on the turn. Looking for another Queen or an eight to give him a critical double up, Gumz instead saw a ten on the river to give the title to Stefanov.

1. Milen Stefanov, $545,070
2. Fabian Gumz, $353,380
3. David Novosel, $260,845
4. Roman Korenev, $194,605
5. Cesar Fuentes, $146,760
6. Francis Anderson, $111,895

With the conclusion of the festival in South Florida, the WPT now packs up the trucks for action nearly 3000 miles away. The WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic, the traditional stop by the WPT before the Christmas holiday, begins on December 16 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. That tournament, one of the few $10K events still left on the WPT circuit, is a favorite of the professionals who are looking for some action around their homes and the amateurs looking to take their shot at the “big time.” While that tournament looms on the horizon, Milen Stefanov will bask in the glory of being the latest WPT champion and some notoriety from his Bulgarian countrymen and women.

The post Bulgaria’s Milen Stefanov Earns First Major Title in Winning WPT Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Presidential 'disdain' may have been a factor

re:Invernt AWS CEO Andy Jassy faced the press yesterday at Amazon's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and there was one thing above all else that the press wanted to discuss. Why was Amazon heading to court to challenge the US Department of Defense's decision to award its $10bn "Project Jedi" IT project to Microsoft rather than to, well, AWS?…

Privacy developers concerned over Chocolate Factory plans

A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition. In development since 2015, Google has been experimenting with the API since the release of Chrome 59 in 2017. As its name suggests, it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a corresponding native app is installed on a user's device.…

Images beamed back from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft leave scientists baffled

Pic A closeup image of Bennu snapped by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reveals that the asteroid’s surface is surprisingly volatile, randomly spitting out shards of debris into space.…

Who needs an elevator pitch when you have man-in-the-middle attack?

A group of hackers used a compromised email account to steal a start-up's $1m venture capital payment.…

Boffins ride the memory bus past Intel's SGX to your data

Computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and semiconductor biz SK Hynix have found a way to defeat secure enclave protections by observing memory requests from a CPU to off-chip DRAM through the memory bus.…

Finally, a good use for documentary filmmakers

The US State Department is being sued over its policy of crawling the social media accounts of people applying for entry visas.…

Looking forward to seeing these in, well, anything would be nice

Qualcomm will today expand its range of Snapdragon system-on-chips for always-connected Arm-based Windows 10 tablet-laptops from one to three.…

Highest-ranked front shooter yet for the poser in your life

The middle ground of the smartphone market is a bit of a battleground. Manufacturers of all stripes – except Apple – keep flinging devices at punters with fairly high-end specs, but price tags under the £500 mark. The latest salvo comes from embattled Chinese comms giant Huawei, which today announced the launch of its Nova 6 handset.…

What happens when you throw your lot in with crypto-coin types

Collaboration site Keybase, once touted for its encrypted meetup channels and robust developer features, is struggling to ward off an epidemic of harassment and spam brought about by its shift toward cryptocurrency.…

Claims it's unconstitutional

Huawei Technologies today filed a fresh lawsuit against the US Federal Communications Commission over its decision to ban rural carriers from buying the company's mobile hardware with Universal Service Fund (USF) cash.…