England keep sights on rugby’s Everest in relentless climb to game’s summit | Robert Kitson
After finally scaling Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953 the first person Edmund Hillary encountered on his descent was his longtime climbing friend, George Lowe.“Well, George,” Hillary said, “we knocked the bastard off.” Which is basically how England’s captain, Maro Itoje, and his team felt on Saturday having lifted the Hillary Shield, named in honour of the indomitable New Zealander who conquered the world’s most famous summit.English rugby’s ultimate Everest is still up ahead of them, of course, in the form of the 2027 World Cup, but this was their South Col moment.And while a first home win against the All Blacks since 2012 and their second‑highest margin of victory in this 120-year-old fixture will both be sources of satisfaction there was also a powerful sense that their upwardly mobile trek is far from complete.
We shall return in a moment to the dark flip side of that proposition – that New Zealand are edging dangerously close to the abyss of unprecedented mediocrity – and South Africa obviously still stand head and shoulders above everyone else,But listening to Itoje on Saturday night was to sense that all involved with England are genuinely excited to find out just how much higher they can go,Their optimism is not simply fuelled by 10 wins on the spin, nor the coming of age of outstanding young prospects such as Guy Pepper, Henry Pollock and Immanuel Feyi-Waboso,Rather it is the depth of belief that England are beginning to build, their growing composure regardless of situation or opposition and the leadership example that is now revealing itself,Take Itoje’s morning-of-the-game address to his squad.
The hours before kick-off can be long and enervating but on Saturday the routine of poached eggs, porridge and protein shakes was not uppermost in the captain’s mind.Having tasted series victory with the British & Irish Lions in Australia less than four months earlier, he wanted to impress on the less experienced players just how much they should cherish the big days.“I’ve been fortunate enough to be around England for a while and to have been around professional rugby for a while,” Itoje said.“But sometimes it can just feel like a job … a normal job where you’re just showing up for training and showing up to games.Because you do it so regularly, sometimes you have to take a step back and actually realise where you are.
” So he urged them to think back to the fondest dreams they had as kids: of playing at a sold-out Twickenham, of facing the haka, of beating the mighty All Blacks.And, lo, so it came to pass that Maro and his young dreamers’ dearest wishes were granted.At 12-0 down they could have wilted; instead George Ford’s rat-a-tat drop goals gave them a foothold back in the contest, the home scrum is becoming “a weapon” to quote Itoje again, and there are also encouraging signs that England are thinking smarter and operating with greater clarity.There were numerous little snapshots but perhaps the best example arrived in the 54th minute.Clean lineout ball was not always England’s staple diet but this time Alex Mitchell sent a fizzing miss pass straight to Ollie Lawrence, thundering down the inside-centre channel.
The most obvious option was for Lawrence to continue thundering straight down the train tracks into contact, which is what the All Black midfield were clearly expecting.Instead, with a deftly flicked ball to his right, Lawrence found his centre partner Fraser Dingwall, wearing 12 but now deployed further out.If poetry in motion is a slight stretch, the unalloyed joy on Dingwall’s face as he arrowed through the gap to score would have warmed the stoniest English heart.Cunning variation, subtle subterfuge, inch-perfect execution … precisely the qualities, ironically, that were once New Zealand’s rugby hallmark.Sign up to The BreakdownThe latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week's action reviewedafter newsletter promotionLook, maybe it’s too early to write off the Scott Robertson project but, goodness, the great “Razor” has his work cut out.
On this blunt-edged evidence the All Blacks’ 43-10 implosion against South Africa in Wellington in September was no blip and all that “lost aura” chatter is justified.Did you know Australia Under-18s have thrashed NZ secondary schools twice inside the past two months, racking up a total of 130 points in the process? Let’s just say the old impregnable All Black edifice is crumbling to a point where it is going to take a mighty effort to rebuild it.Which, ultimately, would be bad news for everyone, England included.The day the All Blacks fade to grey is the day rugby shrinks significantly in the global imagination, regardless of how good the Springboks and others continue to be.Perhaps the time really has come for New Zealand Rugby to ask themselves whether a South African-free Super Rugby Pacific competition is weakening their national team.
England, on the other hand, can now lift their eyes to the hills, with the World Cup draw scheduled for 3 December.Assuming they see off Argentina on Sunday, all is suddenly set fair, with the injured Ollie Chessum and Tommy Freeman among a number of extended squad members pushing for places in the 2026 Six Nations.Their captain is already convinced there is much more to come and that England can successfully shatter some other glass ceilings between now and 2027.“We want to get better,” Itoje said.“When I think about the squad, where we are and our desire to grow as a team, I think we can.
” English self-belief, in other words, is increasingly back.And as the late Sir Edmund Hillary once sagely observed: “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”
AI firm claims it stopped Chinese state-sponsored cyber-attack campaign
A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a “handful of successful intrusions”.This was a “significant escalation” from previous AI-enabled attacks it monitored, it wrote in a blogpost on Thursday, because Claude acted largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed without a human in the loop.“The actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyber-attack largely executed without human intervention at scale,” it wrote.Anthropic did not clarify which financial institutions and government agencies had been targeted, or what exactly the hackers had achieved – although it did say they were able to access their targets’ internal data
People in the UK: have you received good or bad financial advice from an AI chatbot?
Tech companies are pumping billions into the growth of artificial intelligence, with OpenAI this month signing a $38bn (£29bn) cloud computing deal with Amazon as part of a $3tn datacentre spending spree.But as people increasingly use AI chatbots – such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI and Perplexity – for advice and task completion, some observers have concerns about misinformation, hullicinations and irresponsible advice.A survey this year from KPMG and the University of Melbourne found that 80 percent of people in the UK believe AI regulation is required.We want to hear from people who have asked chatbots for financial advice. Have you asked AI tools for help with money, debt or personal finance? Were you recommended anything unexpected, or unsuitable? What was the financial result? Do you have concerns?You can tell us about askng AI tools for financial advice herePlease include as much detail as possible
AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads
Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.“You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk,” reads a lyric from Walk My Walk, a seeming double entendre challenging those opposed to AI-generated music
UK firms can win a significant chunk of the AI chip market | John Browne
The UK is in a uniquely promising position, far too little understood, to play a lucrative role in the coming era of artificial intelligence – but only if it also grabs the opportunity to start making millions of computer chips.AI requires vast numbers of chips and we could supply up to 5% of world demand if we get our national act together.Our legacy in chip design is world-class, starting with the first general-purpose electronic computer, the first electronic memory and the first parallel computer. Today we have Cambridge-based Arm, a quiet titan designing more than 90% of the chips powering phones and tablets globally.With such a pedigree, it is not idle daydreaming for British companies to win a significant chunk of the AI chip market; 5% is a conservative, achievable ambition
EU investigates Google over ‘demotion’ of commercial content from news media
The EU has opened an investigation into Google Search over concerns the US tech company has been “demoting” commercial content from news media sites.The bloc’s executive arm announced the move after monitoring found that certain content created with advertisers and sponsors was being given such a low priority by Google that it was in effect no longer visible in search results.European Commission officials said this potentially unfair “loss of visibility and of revenue” to media owners could be a result of an anti-spam policy Google operates.Under the rules of the Digital Market Act (DMA), which governs competition in the tech sectors, Google must apply “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions of access to publishers’ websites on Google Search”.Commission officials said the investigation was not into the overall indexing of newspapers or their reporting on Google Search, just into commercial content provided by third parties
Anthropic announces $50bn plan for datacenter construction in US
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50bn investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new datacenters in Texas and New York.“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said in a press release.Building the massive information warehouses takes an average of two years in the US and requires copious amounts of energy to fuel the facilities. The company, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, popular with businesses adopting AI, said in a statement that the “scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier”. Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs
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