Latest news with #LauraChambers
BBC News
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Fans flock to Lorde's secret set at Glastonbury
Update: Date: 12:14 BST Title: Meet Glasto's most-resourceful: 'Luke and the Coneheads' Content: Katie RazzallCulture editor I think I have found the most resourceful festival-goers. Among the crowd at Lorde, "Luke and the Coneheads", as they introduced themselves. Luke is the decorated ironing board, named after a friend who couldn't make it. Laura Chambers (sporting the traffic cone hat) and her friends from Buckinghamshire are Glastonbury stalwarts. Laura told me the ironing board is "essential, it's key to the group, you can put your drinks on it". As for the cone head? "You can find your friends in a crowd… because you lose everyone but when you have the cone on, you can find everyone." Hats off to them (except it's too hot to do that). Update: Date: 12:07 BST Title: We're already being treated to a raft of surprise guests Content: Colin PatersonEntertainment correspondent, reporting from Glastonbury Surprise guest names are everywhere this morning. Over at the Greenpeace stage, Benedict Cumberbatch is putting on the first Letters Live at Glastonbury, the show where celebrities read out letters, both meaningful and humorous. So far actors Andrew Scott, James Norton, Bella Ramsey and Simon Pegg (with Rik Mayall's letter to Bob Geldof after he was turned away from the recording of Live Aid) have all been on. The jazz drifting in from another near by stage adds a surreal element to proceedings. Update: Date: 11:54 BST Title: What's the forecast for Glastonbury today? Content: After some rain last night, Glasto-goers will enjoy warmer weather and lots of sunshine on the first official day of the festival. Here's the forecast from Matt Taylor: This video can not be played Update: Date: 11:49 BST Title: Lorde emerges to strobes and synths for secret set Content: Mark SavageBBC Music correspondent, reporting from Glastonbury There's an almighty roar as Lorde takes the stage, proving all the rumours true. She emerges to strobe lights and a disorientating synth drone, before launching into Hammer, a single from her freshly-minted album, Virgin. The tent is over-spilling and sweaty. Glastonbury has just closed access to the Woodsies field. You can watch Lorde's performance live by hitting the watch live button above. Update: Date: 11:48 BST Title: What else is happening on Friday? Content: Aside from the big names on the Pyramid Stage, there's plenty of other acts to see across the festival on Friday. Here's a quick run-through the highlights: Whatever you choose, one thing is clear: you're spoiled for choice. Update: Date: 11:48 BST Title: Coming up on the Pyramid Stage Content: The 1975 are headlining the Pyramid Stage tonight - their first live performance since Matty Healy announced they'd go on an indefinite hiatus after their last tour ended in 2024 Update: Date: 11:48 BST Title: Three things I've learned from my 11 years at Glastonbury Content: Mark SavageBBC Music correspondent, reporting from Glastonbury The first time I went to Glastonbury, it was 2003, and I lost my fiancée in the crowd watching Radiohead's headline set. That night, someone relieved themselves on our tent as we slept. It wasn't an auspicious introduction. But there's something about it that keeps me coming back. Everywhere you turn, someone's having the best night of their year. They might be falling in love, they might be witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime performance (Dolly Parton for me), or they might be relieving themselves on a stranger's tent. However you get your kicks, I guess. This year will be my 11th Glastonbury as a journalist, and I've learned a few essential secrets. Firstly, the festival runs on Haribo. Seriously, there are bags everywhere. When it gets hot, they melt into one giant mecha-Haribo. Secondly, bands are way more relaxed doing interviews backstage than in their record company office or a TV studio. Liam Gallagher, a notoriously spiky conversationalist, once told me he liked my t-shirt on live television. Beat that, Graham Norton. Thirdly, there is no festival like it. I know, I know. You hear that so much it become meaningless. But honestly, there's a sense of humanity and kinship that sets it apart from the corporate blandness of the rest of the festival scene. I think it's because the whole event is a family affair. So many of the stages are run by generations of the same family that there's an intimacy and sense of humour that would be impossible to manufacture. Case in point: When Hurts played the John Peel Tent in 2011, they asked for 'two dozen pictures of models' on their dressing room wall. The team dutifully got the stage crew – all hairy men of a certain age - to strip off their t-shirts and pose for a series of black and white photos. The band's reaction is sadly unrecorded. Update: Date: 11:47 BST Title: The stage is set for Glastonbury 2025 Content: The gates are open, the tents have been pitched, outfits donned and acts poised to perform... Glastonbury 2025 is a-go. As the action builds at Worthy Farm, approximately 200,000 festival-goers are bracing themselves for a jam packed weekend. Though some people have spent two nights camping under the Somerset skies already, the official line-up of acts begins today with The 1975, Biffy Clyro, Alanis Morrisette and CMAT set to grace the Pyramid Stage. But Glastonbury is much more than just the Pyramid Stage - with more than 100 stages hosting talent from across the music landscape, there really is something for everyone. You can watch the acts live from the comfort of your home - no long walks between stages or battles to bag a good spot at the stage. We'll have five streams running, broadcasting all the action on the different stages. Just head to the Watch & Listen tab at top of this page to follow along.
Business Times
06-06-2025
- Business
- Business Times
We need a new deal for the Web
GIVEN that Google attracts more than 136 billion visits a month – as many as the next 12 most popular websites combined – it is easy to see how a US federal judge concluded last year that the company ran a monopoly in online search and had abused its market dominance. Last week, Judge Amit Mehta heard the final arguments about what remedies to impose. His conclusions are expected in August. The US justice department, which launched the antitrust lawsuit, is demanding that Google be broken up. It wants to force the company to sell its Chrome browser, ban the massive payments it makes to Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to be their default search engine, and share data with competitors. That would surely be a triumph for free-market competition, motherhood and apple pie. Yet, as ever with regulatory interventions, the skill lies in ensuring that any corrective action anticipates tomorrow's challenges rather than just trying to fix today's problems. That's especially tough right now. As the judge acknowledged, the digital economy is evolving fast thanks to the light-speed diffusion of artificial intelligence. Some suggest that AI might even undermine the financial viability of the open, human, ad-supported Web on which Google has gorged. However much it may (or may not) abuse its market dominance, Google remains the strongest champion of the existing Web and many users would miss it if it were gone. Since being invented 36 years ago, the Web has emerged as one of humanity's most precious resources, giving any online user anywhere access to almost all of the world's knowledge. It has also become the foundation on which many thousands of digital businesses have been built. But it has its darker deformities and there is a risk that AI might further degrade it in two insidious ways. First, the big AI companies are in effect strip-mining all websites for content to train their models and paying back almost nothing in return to sustain the ecosystem. At present, Google accounts for about 90 per cent of the global search market and directs a torrent of traffic – and advertising – to content sites. Even though they may (understandably) complain about the terms, some content creators fear the trade itself may be in jeopardy because far fewer users would visit their sites. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up AI models aggregate and summarise the Web's content rather than encouraging users to visit the original content source. That may destroy the financial incentives for creating new content. 'I think that is a risk,' Laura Chambers, chief executive of the technology company Mozilla, tells me. 'How can we ensure that the Internet remains healthy?' The obvious survival mechanism for creators is to build walled gardens by erecting more paywalls around their content, or to move to closed channels off the open Web. For many companies, it may make sense to deepen direct-to-consumer business models via social media or their own apps. But both trends would further devalue the richness, utility and universality of the Web. The second threat is that AI models are increasingly flooding the Web with machine-generated slop. For the first time in a decade, bots have overtaken humans on the Web, accounting for an estimated 51 per cent of total traffic, according to the data and US cybersecurity group Imperva. The ability of generative AI to create plausible content at minimal cost means this trend is only likely to accelerate. An AI-mediated Web could move it further towards a 'dark forest', an increasingly hostile space populated by predatory bots that seize on any living thing. We may not like our current surveillance capitalism, in which users are tracked and targeted with ads. Subordination capitalism would be still worse. Yet, there are more positive visions of the Web's future, as recently sketched out by Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft, which runs Bing, a very distant second in search. The increasing interaction of bots means that new open protocols are being developed to enable interoperability on this agentic Web. That creates the possibility for a different Web architecture and a 'new deal', in which 'everybody's incentives are aligned, where the creators and consumers have their interests balanced and there aren't a bunch of weird intermediaries constraining how utility and value gets exchanged', Scott told The Verge. No one yet knows exactly how to build such a glorious future. But whatever Judge Mehta can do to help nudge us in that direction would be appreciated. FINANCIAL TIMES
