Stokes wants to be one of ‘lucky few’ England captains to claim Ashes victory in Australia
Ben Stokes is aiming to become one of the “lucky few” England captains to claim an away Ashes victory as he called on his players to forget a 15‑year barren spell in Australia and “create our own history”.After being shut out by the pandemic four years ago, up to 40,000 England supporters are estimated to be descending on Australia over the course of this winter.All are hopeful of witnessing an all-time classic and a change to the story after three winless Ashes tours.Stokes, ready to unleash Mark Wood and Jofra Archer when the series begins in Perth Stadium on Friday, is fully aware of the challenge: succeed and he will become just the sixth postwar England captain to do so after Andrew Strauss (2010-11), Mike Gatting (1986-87), Mike Brearley (1978-79), Ray Illingworth (1970-71) and Len Hutton (1954-55).“I have come here absolutely desperate to get home on that plane in January as one of the lucky few captains from England to have come here and been successful,” Stokes said, having named a 12‑member match‑day squad that includes Shoaib Bashir as the spin‑bowling option.
“A lot has been spoken about the history and how it has gone for England [in recent years].This is our chance to create our own history and it is up to us how that looks.“Everyone in the world, everyone in Australia, everyone in England, knows how big this series is and I think if we were to come out and not accept that – treat it as just another series – we’d only be lying to ourselves.”While Stokes recently signed a new two-year contract with England that takes him through to the 2027 Ashes at home, this impending series marks the defining moment in a four‑year project led by his aggressive captaincy and an ultra‑positive head coach in Brendon McCullum.Stokes said: “[It is a case of] looking it in the eyes, taking it on, not being afraid of the challenge that we have ahead of us.
We know it’s a huge task coming to Australia and everything that comes with that away from the field, on the field.”Archer and Wood have not featured in the same England Test attack since a one-off outing against West Indies in 2020.Both have been through injury ordeals and after meticulous rehabilitation programmes designed with this series in mind they are primed to hit Australia with pace.“Two years ago we would have bitten your hand off to be able to take this group of bowlers with us,” said Stokes, who along with his own brand of muscular fast-medium has Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse in the squad for the series opener and Josh Tongue waiting in the wings.Sign up to The SpinSubscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s actionafter newsletter promotion“The bowlers we have got can all bowl over 85mph.
Some can hit the early 90s to mid-90s.But you’ve also got to add skill to that as well.And that’s what we’ve been lucky enough to pick bowlers who can all do that.“I’m excited to be able to have [Archer] as part of this group.When he gets given an opportunity to influence the game, I know that he’ll be flying in and giving absolutely 100% towards that.
There’s no doubt at some point he’s going to make a huge impact on the series,”England squad for the first Test: Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Ben Stokes (c), Jamie Smith (wk), Mark Wood, Gus Atkinson, Jofra Archer, Brydon Carse, Shoaib Bashir
TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds
TikTok is giving users the power to reduce the amount of artificial intelligence-made content on their feeds, as it revealed the platform hosts more than 1bn AI videos.The change, which is being tested over the next few weeks before a global rollout, comes as new video-generating tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have spurred a surge in AI content online.The Guardian revealed in August that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels globally only show AI-generated videos. Many qualify as “AI slop”, the term for low-quality, mass-produced content that is often nonsensical or surreal.Jade Nester, TikTok’s European director of public policy for safety and privacy, said: “We know from our community that many people enjoy content made with AI tools, from digital art to science explainers, and we want to give people the power to see more or less of that, based on their own preferences
Meta wins major US antitrust case and won’t have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram
Meta defeated a major challenge to its business on Tuesday when a US judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.The case, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, with the former FTC chair accusing the company of operating a “buy or bury” scheme against nascent competitors. The tech giant bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014. Losing either the image-based social network, which generates an estimated half of Meta’s revenue, or the world’s most popular messaging app could have done existential damage to Meta’s empire.The US district judge James Boasberg issued his ruling on Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May
What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?
The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic
Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened
The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issueThe outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hoursIt affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S
Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet
A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.The outage was reported at 11
Amazon vs Perplexity: the AI agent war has arrived
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery.A tech titan and a startup are fighting over who controls the next phase of artificial intelligence.Amazon has sued Perplexity AI, a prominent artificial intelligence startup, over a shopping feature in that company’s browser that allows it to automate placing orders for users. Amazon accused Perplexity AI of covertly accessing customer accounts and disguising AI activity as human browsing
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