Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A customer opens an exchange account, copies a string of numbers and follows a path through a Merkle tree. The page processes the request and returns a reassuring result: the customer’s balance was included in the exchange’s proof of reserves.The verification is most likely technically sound, establishing that the account appeared in a dataset and that the exchange controlled wallets that contained enough of a particular asset to cover the balances represented there.However, it can easily leave out whether every customer appears in that dataset, how much the exchange owes to lenders, whether the displayed coins have been pledged as…

As August begins, Canada’s wildfire crisis has shifted increasingly westward, where spreading flames have triggered evacuations and a provincial state of emergency in British Columbia weeks after smoke from Ontario fires choked cities to the south.An explosive wildfire forced the evacuation of roughly 20,000 people from several Okanagan Lake communities on Saturday. The Bald Range fire was discovered around 5:30 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, about 10 miles northwest of Summerland, burning just 20 acres. Four hours later it had erupted to nearly 12,400 acres, said Erick Thompson, spokesman for the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen emergency operations. The fire is…

The Senate bowed to political reality at 4:36 a.m. on Saturday, adjourning and allowing bleary-eyed senators to leave Washington without any concrete steps toward passing the voting restriction bill that President Trump has demanded for months. Republican lawmakers had insisted they would work tirelessly to enact election changes that Mr. Trump has suggested the party needs in place to win the midterm elections. Instead, they departed with little to show for their efforts, other than a performative pre-dawn procedural vote on a watered-down version of the bill that they knew they could not pass.Even the staunchest advocates of the election…

Tom Vek burst onto the scene in 2005 with his album We Have Sound, which garnered a solid 7.6 from the tastemakers of the day over at Pitchfork. His undeniably catchy brand of dancy indietronica landed him an appearance on The OC and placement on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack. His follow-up, Leisure Seizure, had a lengthy gestation period, but arrived in 2011 to similar success, reaching No. 79 on the UK charts.Vek has continued to release music at regular intervals over the last 15 years, dropping Newer Symbols in 2022. But in 2020 he started toying with this…

Ravie LakshmananAug 08, 2026Vulnerability / Network Security The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical-severity security flaw impacting Progress Kemp LoadMaster to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-8037 (CVSS score: 9.6), is a command injection flaw that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible devices. “Progress LoadMaster contains a command injection vulnerability that allows an un-authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the LoadMaster appliance by exploiting unsanitized input in multiple command endpoints,” CISA said. In an analysis published in…

In brief The Senate took its first formal step toward voting on the Clarity Act, with Thune filing the motion to proceed early Saturday after an overnight session. The move tees up an initial procedural vote on September 15. Senators would need to reach agreement on several unresolved issues in the bill before now and then for the crypto market to get Clarity. The U.S. Senate has taken its first formal step toward voting on the Clarity Act, with leadership moving early Saturday to tee up a vote on the crypto market-structure bill and lock in a September date.Senate Majority…

Adults may need far more weekly exercise than current guidelines recommend to achieve a major reduction in the risk of heart attack and stroke, according to findings from an observational study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The researchers found that substantial cardiovascular protection was associated with 560 to 610 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week. That amount is roughly 3 to 4 times higher than the current public health recommendation of at least 150 minutes per week. Moderate-to-vigorous activities include brisk walking, running, and cycling. Fitness Level May Change Exercise Needs The study also suggests…

There is also a belief that greater regulation alone will achieve little.Too much conservation work currently relies on philanthropists’ cash and devoted volunteers, those in the sector say, and much more languishes on the to-do list due to a lack of money.The federal government directly spends about A$700m on nature protection, a fraction of the A$33bn – or 1% of GDP – conservationists say it should be. That is an eyebrow-raising figure, people like Paul Elton concede, but one they argue is reasonable.According to his research – which the government disputes – more than A$26bn is still being spent on…

Oman has said positive talks have been taking place with Iran over an agreement to secure a shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz, as Tehran warned that any deal would not see an immediate reopening of the vital waterway.Both sides suggested on Saturday that discussions were progressing, but a timeline on any deal being finalised remained unclear. Oman’s foreign ministry warned against attacks on shipping that could hamper that.Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said talks were in their final stages but the reopening of the strait remained “subject to other conditions”.Tehran has effectively blockaded the waterway, through which around…

To power its new West Texas data center, Amazon is investing in the construction of a new power plant that could be one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the US, according to the New York Times. The new gas-burning plant in Pecos County, Texas has received significant investment from Amazon and, at least initially, would not be connected to the state’s power grid. Instead, its 35 natural-gas turbines would primarily deliver its 7.65 gigawatts of electricity to the new data center.According to Cleanview, which tracks data centers and their associated power projects, GW Ranch received a…