A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition, but is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy

Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.

Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.

The maverick director and his trusted cast on making Kinds of Kindness, the ‘bonkers’ film causing a stir on the Croisette

Joe Alwyn, the British star of one of the most disturbing films to compete at the Cannes festival this year, has given his verdict on making the “bonkers” Kinds of Kindness, which features scenes of group sex, cannibalism and violence and in which Alwyn has to perform a drug rape on the character played by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. “You have to try not to unpack it all too much, or you get it stuck in your head,” he said on Saturday.

The 33-year-old, until now best known as a former partner of Taylor Swift, has been thrust into the glaring lights of Cannes this weekend, but has also had to survive entering the odd imagination of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. Alwyn said the best way to prepare himself for Lanthimos’s unsettling and explicit screen world had been to “trust him, trust him, trust him”. “It is bizarre and strange and bonkers and special,” Alwyn added, “but one of the reasons I love his films is because you feel it first, before you try to understand it all.”

The 20-year failed romance between a singer and a dodgy music promoter becomes the vehicle for director Jia Zhangke’s latest exploration of China’s momentous recent history

As so often in the past, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke swims down into an ocean of sadness and strangeness; his new film is a mysterious quest narrative with a dynamic, westernised musical score. It tells a human story of a failed romance spanning 20 years, and brings this into parallel with a larger panorama: the awe-inspiring scale of millennial change that has transformed China in the same period, a futurist fervour for quasi-capitalist innovation that has turned out to co-exist with some very old-fashioned state coercion.

Caught by the Tides reflects with a kind of numb astonishment at all the novelties that the country has been required to welcome, all the vast upheavals for which the people have had to make sacrifices. The film shows us the mobster-businessmen who have done well in modern China, the patriotic ecstasy of Beijing getting picked to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the creation of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam which meant so much unacknowledged pain for the displaced communities. (This latter was the subject of Jia’s Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life in 2006.) And finally of course there is the misery of the Covid lockdown.

Ex-president’s legal team sure to make hay out of Juan Merchan’s $35 gift to Biden for President and anti-Republican groups

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money campaign finance trial in New York has been cautioned by a state ethics panel over two small donations made to Democrat-aligned groups in 2020.

The caution is likely to be seized on by Trump and his lawyers as evidence of his claims that the New York trial, now entering its fourth week, has been unfairly adjudicated by Judge Juan Merchan along partisan political lines.

Victoria Atkins says she has asked officials to look into claims doctors and nurses who have spoken up were mistreated

The NHS must listen to whistleblowers and investigate their concerns in the interests of patient safety, the health secretary has said.

Victoria Atkins said she had asked officials to look into cases where there were claims of mistreatment of people who had spoken up about the issues they had experienced.

The weather didn’t play ball, but Magnus von Horn’s fierce fairytale and Andrea Arnold’s kitchen-sink take on English mysticism should count among the first-week highlights for Greta Gerwig’s jury

The Cannes film festival opens just as the heavens do, too. It’s raining on the red carpet and on the black limousines and on the immaculate white pavilions that line up on the beach. The rain falls on the A-listers as they climb the stairs to the Palais, and on the stoic huddled masses who gather behind the police cordons. Everybody’s bedraggled and windswept; it feels as though the whole town’s been at sea. “My main wish is that we see some great films this year,” says Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president, casting an anxious eye at the sky. “But also I’m wishing for a little sunshine as well.”

If it’s raining in Cannes, it means there’s a glitch in the script. It’s one of the event’s in-built paradoxes that a festival which predominantly plays out in darkened rooms should be so dependent on good weather; so in thrall to its complementary circus of photocalls, yacht parties and open-air film screenings. All it takes is a downpour to trigger a disturbance in the force, a creeping sense of existential dread. The punters came expecting Technicolor. But the scene is all wrong: the world has gone monochrome.

Vermont State University confers doctorate in ‘litter-ature’ upon tabby for being keen hunter of mice and beloved figure on campus

Men named Max have won the Nobel prize (Planck), the Oscar for best actor (Schell), and multiple Formula One world championships (Verstappen).

A cat in the US named Max now joins those lofty ranks, having earned a doctorate in “litter-ature” when Vermont State University bestowed an honorary degree on the campus-dwelling tabby in recognition of his friendliness, a gesture which quickly achieved virality in corners of the internet dedicated to spotlighting light-hearted news.

Trump’s former fixer gave damning testimony – and he’ll return to the stand on Monday as the trial moves towards a close

Donald Trump’s criminal trial is drawing to a close, with two looming questions: what will the jury decide, and how will America react?

After weeks of testimony from witnesses including the porn star Stormy Daniels, National Enquirer boss David Pecker and former senior Trump aide Hope Hicks, the trial came to an inflection point this week with its star witness. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and attorney who has since turned into a bellicose critic of his old boss, was on the stand all three days court was in session this week. He delivered damning testimony – then faced a tough if uneven grilling from Trump’s team.

Cannes film festival
Completed just before his assisted death, the French New Wave master director talks through his ideas as illustrated in his hand-drawn scrapbook

Here is an intriguing footnote to Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary career - a docu-textual movie collage lasting just under an hour in two parts, or maybe two layers, completed just before his assisted death two years ago in Switzerland at the age of 91. His collaborator and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno calls it not the “last Godard” but a “new Godard”. In its way, this little double film shows us a very great deal about Godard’s working habits, and it’s a late example of Godard speaking intimately in his own person about his own creative process.

Scénarios appears to have grown out of thoughts generated by his last film, The Image Book, which emerged in 2018. Godard sketched out his storyboarded or scrapbooked ideas for a short piece, which would juxtapose images, quotations, musical cues and clips in his distinctive manner. Aragno edited and curated the film from this blueprint, then came back to see Godard and to shoot a brief sequence of the director reciting a text from Sartre to go at the end. This is the first short film we see.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

Enlarge / A kitty named Clover prepares to play with a robot arm in the Cat Royale "multi-species" science/art installation . (credit: Blast Theory - Stephen Daly)

Cats and robots are a winning combination, as evidenced by all those videos of kitties riding on Roombas. And now we have Cat Royale, a "multispecies" live installation in which three cats regularly "played" with a robot over 12 days, carefully monitored by human operators. Created by computer scientists from the University of Nottingham in collaboration with artists from a group called Blast Theory, the installation debuted at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia, last year and is now a touring exhibit. The accompanying YouTube video series recently won a Webby Award, and a paper outlining the insights gleaned from the experience was similarly voted best paper at the recent Computer-Human Conference (CHI’24).

"At first glance, the project is about designing a robot to enrich the lives of a family of cats by playing with them," said co-author Steve Benford of the University of Nottingham, who led the research, "Under the surface, however, it explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves." While cats might love Roombas, not all animal encounters with robots are positive: Guide dogs for the visually impaired can get confused by delivery robots, for example, while the rise of lawn mowing robots can have a negative impact on hedgehogs, per Benford et al.

Blast Theory and the scientists first held a series of exploratory workshops to ensure the installation and robotic design would take into account the welfare of the cats. "Creating a multispecies system—where cats, robots, and humans are all accounted for—takes more than just designing the robot," said co-author Eike Schneiders of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab about the primary takeaway from the project. "We had to ensure animal well-being at all times, while simultaneously ensuring that the interactive installation engaged the (human) audiences around the world. This involved consideration of many elements, including the design of the enclosure, the robot, and its underlying systems, the various roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and, of course, the selection of the cats.”

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Medical professionals and women who had bad experiences themselves respond to the findings of the birth trauma report

The maternity trauma report is deja vu all over again (Women having ‘harrowing’ births as hospitals hide failures, says MPs’ report, 13 May). I cannot read about it because it makes me want to scream.

I was around for the Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust report a couple of years ago. All those dead babies, all those mothers and parents talking about not being listened to or respected. All that handwringing from service providers, all those promises from politicians. The recommendations were set up to prevent the experiences we heard about this week (‘I was left lying on the ground in pain’: shocking stories from UK birth trauma inquiry, 13 May). For instance, continuity of midwifery care through the maternal pathway prevents so much of the stuff we read about now.

Cannes film festival
Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons

Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.

An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.

Scientist discovers a cast of recurring characters using burrows in the aftermath of bushfire, after sifting through more than 700,000 images

First came a picture of an inquisitive red-necked wallaby, then an image of a bare-nosed wombat, followed by a couple of shots of the wombat’s burrow with nothing else in the frame.

By the time research scientist Grant Linley had looked through a further 746,670 images, he had seen 48 different species visiting the 28 wombat burrows that he had trained his cameras on.

Source: www.darkreading.com – Author: Kristina Beek, Associate Editor, Dark Reading Source: Ian Allenden via Alamy Stock Photo For the first time ever, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Enforcement Bureau has identified a specific threat group as being behind a spate of pernicious robocall campaigns. The group, dubbed “Royal Tiger,” has associates in India, the United […]

La entrada FCC Reveals 'Royal Tiger' Robocall Campaign – Source: www.darkreading.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

In this guide, we'll walk you through integrating CyberArk Conjur with GitGuardian, step by step.

The post Activating end-to-end secrets security with CyberArk and GitGuardian appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Source: thehackernews.com – Author: . May 16, 2024NewsroomRansomware / Incident Response The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said it has observed a threat it tracks under the name Storm-1811 abusing the client management tool Quick Assist to target users in social engineering attacks. “Storm-1811 is a financially motivated cybercriminal group known to deploy Black Basta ransomware,” […]

La entrada Cybercriminals Exploiting Microsoft’s Quick Assist Feature in Ransomware Attacks – Source:thehackernews.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Cyber Threats Targeting Political Candidates

“Individuals who play important roles in our democracy are an attractive target for cyber actors seeking to disrupt or otherwise undermine our open and free society. That’s why the NCSC has ramped up our support for people at higher risk of being targeted online to ensure they can better protect their accounts and devices from attacks,” Ellison said.

This week, it was Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen’s turn to take the stand in the hush-money trial in New York. Cohen walked the jury through the steps he says he took to make any potential story that would damage Trump’s image go away, in advance of the 2016 election.

The defence is trying to chip away at Cohen’s credibility, to sow seeds of doubt among the jury listening to his testimony. So how did he do? Jonathan Freedland asks former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori what he makes of the prosecution’s star witness so far

Archive: Fox News 5, CBS News, CNN, Sky Australia

Top 30 Cybersecurity Influencers of 2024

30. Alexandre Blanc - President and Owner at Alexandre Blanc Cyber

29. Alissa Abdullah - Deputy CSO at Mastercard

29. Jane Frankland - CEO at KnewStart

27. Mark Lynd - Head of Executive Advisory & Corporate Strategy at NETSYNC

26. Naomi Buckwalter - Director of Product Security at Contrast Security

25. Raj Samani- Chief Scientist for Cybersecurity

24. Tyler Cohen Wood- Co- Founder of Dark Cryptonite

23. Theresa Payton- CEO of Fortalice Solutions

22. Bill Brenner-Vice President, Custom and Research Content Strategy, CyberRisk Alliance 

21. Brian Honan- CEO of BH Consulting

20. Magda Chelly- Senior Cybersecurity Expert

19. Marcus J. Carey- Principal Research Scientist at ReliaQuest, CEO of ThreatCare

18. Andy Greenberg- Senior Writer at WIRED

17. Paul Asadoorian- IT Security Engineer

16. Nicole Perlroth- New York Times

15. Graham Cluley- Smashing Security

14. Rachel Tobac- Hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security 

13. Katie Moussouris- Founder of Luta Security

12. Chuck Brooks- President of Brooks Consulting International 

11. Daniel Miessler- Founder of Unsupervised Learning

10. Kevin Beaumont- Internet Cyber Personality

9. Lesley Carhart- hacks4pancakes

8. Bruce Schneier- Schneier on Security

7. Eugene Kaspersky- CEO of Kaspersky Lab

6. Eric Geller - Cybersecurity Journalist

5. Shira Rubinoff- The Futurum Group 

4. Mikko Hyppönen- Chief Research Officer at WithSecure 

3. Kim Zetter - Investigative Journalist and Book Author

2. Brian Krebs- Krebs on Security

1. Robert Herjavec- CEO of Global Cybersecurity Firm - Cyderes

Enlarge / Artist's conception of NetEase using a legal contract to try to stop a wave of negative reviews of its closed alpha. (credit: NetEase)

The developers of team-based shooter Marvel Rivals have apologized for a contract clause that made creators promise not to provide "subjective negative reviews of the game" in exchange for early access to a closed alpha test.

The controversial early access contract gained widespread attention over the weekend when streamer Brandon Larned shared a portion on social media. In the "non-disparagement" clause shared by Larned, creators who are provided with an early download code are asked not to "make any public statements or engage in discussions that are detrimental to the reputation of the game." In addition to the "subjective negative review" example above, the clause also specifically prohibits "making disparaging or satirical comments about any game-related material" and "engaging in malicious comparisons with competitors or belittling the gameplay or differences of Marvel Rivals."

Extremely disappointed in @MarvelRivals.

Multiple creators asked for key codes to gain access to the playtest and are asked to sign a contract.

The contract signs away your right to negatively review the game.

Many streamers have signed without reading just to play

Insanity. pic.twitter.com/c11BUDyka9

— Brandon Larned (@A_Seagull) May 12, 2024

In a Discord post noticed by PCGamesN over the weekend, Chinese developer NetEase apologized for what it called "inappropriate and misleading terms" in the contract. "Our stand is absolutely open for both suggestions and criticisms to improve our games, and... our mission is to make Marvel Rivals better [and] satisfy players by those constructive suggestions."

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Encryption plays a vital role by scrambling information, making it unreadable to anyone without the decryption key. Linux provides robust protocols like SSL/TLS to establish secure connections between clients and servers. Regularly update cryptographic software, libraries, and the Linux kernel for the latest security patches. Cryptography is the art of creating mathematical techniques to secure […]

The post Understanding Linux Cryptography: Security in the Open Source World appeared first on TuxCare.

The post Understanding Linux Cryptography: Security in the Open Source World appeared first on Security Boulevard.

“I want to assure our entire community, from security researchers and industry partners to individual users, that VirusTotal's core mission remains unchanged. We remain deeply dedicated to collective intelligence and collaboration, fostering a platform where everyone can come together to share knowledge, access valuable threat information, and contribute to the fight against cyber threats,” Quintero said.

Challenges Addressed and Google’s Gemini AI Integration

What’s at the Core of the International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy

1. Promoting an open, inclusive, secure, and resilient digital ecosystem.
2. Aligning rights-respecting approaches to digital and data governance with international partners.
3. Advancing responsible state behavior in cyberspace and countering threats through coalition-building and engagement.
4. Strengthening international partner digital and cyber capacity.

Cybersecurity Threats from Nation States

AI Technology Governance

Active Directory Exposures Dominate the Attack Surface

CVEs are a Drop in the Ocean

Exposed Critical Assets in the Cloud

Exposure Risks Across Sectors

Vultur Android Malware Campaign Trademarks

Things to Do If You Suspect Being Victim

“The apparent intention [of the cyberattack] was to garner sufficient information to mount more sophisticated follow-on attacks, escalating in severity.”

Security Agencies Chose to Remain Tight-Lipped

“Incredibly, despite Australian authorities being notified of this hacking attempt in 2022, agencies did not alert my colleagues and I that we had been targeted.It’s unacceptable that this information was withheld from us for two years,” Chandler added.

“This was not an attack on any single party or House of Parliament. This was an attack on Australian parliamentarians from both Houses and both parties who have dared to exercise their legitimate democratic right to criticize Beijing. As such, it was an attack on Parliament as a whole and demands a robust and proportionate response,” the IPAC members’ statement said.

“I welcome the assurance that in future agencies will inform MPs about any attempts by state-sponsored cyber actors to target parliamentarians,” Senator Claire Chandler said.

“Targeting parliamentarians, as the CCP has done, is not the act of a friend. It is yet another obstacle to a normal bilateral relationship. We should never hesitate to call out this behavior or be afraid to impose real costs to deter it,” he tweeted.

APT31 Used Pixel Tracking Emails

Monash Health Data Breach