Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

HR software provider Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console, an anti-tokenmaxxing product that helps a company track and contain its AI spending. One of the most interesting features is that it maps how much individual employees, teams, and roles are spending and if they are genuinely more productive, or generally producing more AI slop. The company promises the tool will show “which engineers have high AI spend whose peers frequently ask them to redo work in code reviews,” the company says in its blog post. The tool was born after Rippling went all in on tokenmaxxing at the start…

Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi’s) says that hackers used social engineering on three of its employees to gain access to and steal corporate data stored on their machines. The company has disclosed the incident in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), saying that its response was sufficiently quick to prevent the compromise of consumer data. “Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s investigation, the Company believes that certain corporate information was accessed and exfiltrated as a result of the incident,” Levi’s says. “As of the date of this filing, the Company believes that its rapid response efforts…

There is already money on the chain for the feature to serve. Onchain data aggregator RWA.xyz tracks about $1.38 billion of distributed real-world assets on XRPL, including $845.7 million of RLUSD. Ondo accounts for another $212.6 million, followed by VERT Capital at $116.1 million and Archax at $55.4 million. Societe Generale sits further down the table at $11.6 million.Tokenized real-world assets issued on the XRP Ledger. (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)That leaves more than $530 million of tracked tokenized assets outside RLUSD, though the market remains concentrated in a handful of issuers.Confidential Transfers stays narrow in its first version. Holders have to opt…

At time of writing, U.S. President Donald Trump’s haphazard attacks on Iran have killed 18 U.S. service members, an unknown number of Iranian civilians and military personnel, and cost tens of billions of dollars. Most importantly for everyone else on Earth, it has closed the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping. Approximately 90 percent of traded goods are shipped by sea. Disruptions caused by a war over vitally important naval choke points are not new, nor are their calamitous economic effects. Trump’s war has catalyzed a reversion to a period before Great Britain and the United States enforced the neutrality…

At least three people, including a child, have been killed in overnight Russian attacks near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.In the early hours of Saturday missiles hit east of the capital and witnesses reported hearing powerful explosions just days after strikes across Ukraine killed 21 people.Falling debris damaged apartment buildings and cars, while a fire broke out at a separate building, the head of the regional military administration Timur Tkachenko said. He added that three others had been wounded in the ballistic missile strikes.Emergency crews were also fighting fires at a building and fuel tank in Kyiv, Mayor Vitaly Klitchko wrote…

pros and cons Pros Longer-lasting battery and upgraded processor.It’s a functional, general-purpose smartwatch with intelligent touches.It’s great for exercise and training, with accurate heart rate metrics in my testing. Cons It takes a long time to charge.The accompanying band is not super comfortable. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Consumers are catching on to the fact that not every generational upgrade to their favorite tech can be life-changing. Instead, companies are forced to improve their products little by little. I’ve thought about this a lot as I tested the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9. It arrives with a few improvements under…

Mistral AI has released Shieldstral 1.0 3B, an open-weights, policy-adaptive multimodal safety classifier that treats content moderation as a single yes/no question rather than a fixed taxonomy of harm categories. Most guardrail models bake their category list into the weights, so re-targeting one to a new deployment context means retraining — and the same content can be acceptable on a cybersecurity research tool while being harmful on a mental-health platform. Shieldstral inverts that: operators write the policy as a plain-language question at inference time, and the model returns a calibrated safety score from a single forward pass. Built on Ministral-3-3B-Base-2512…

Ravie LakshmananAug 07, 2026Malware / Social Engineering ClickFix-style attacks are being used to deliver a Go-based malware capable of stealing cryptocurrency assets, as well as browser-stored passwords, Apple iCloud Keychain data, and cached credentials. The macOS-focused infection chain is designed to deliver a shell script that profiles the host and then fetches a macOS malware payload that’s compatible with the computer’s CPU architecture. “While the malware payload is capable of stealing passwords, its most interesting function is its capability to slowly deplete cryptocurrency accounts, siphoning their contents into accounts under the threat actor’s control,” Huntress security researcher Andrew Brandt said.…

United States court records unsealed on Thursday show that a federal judge backed crypto exchange Bybit’s effort to trace assets stolen in the $1.5 billion North Korea-linked hack by granting the company expedited discovery. According to the records,  Bybit filed the lawsuit under seal on June 18 against North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau, the Lazarus Group and 20 unidentified defendants. The court granted Bybit’s request for expedited discovery on June 19.The discovery authority gives Bybit a practical route to identify alleged intermediaries and pursue a small portion of stolen assets that remains traceable, rather than relying solely on a judgment…

Mehvish says nothing could have prepared her for what she was told after her full body scan. She left Birmingham’s Neko Health clinic with a life-changing diagnosis.”I expected to feel relief,” the 33-year-old says. “Instead, I was told that I had a rare form of diabetes.”After her long-term blood sugar levels came back very high, she had another blood test which confirmed she had suspected diabetes.She was referred back to her GP, who sent her for an urgent hospital appointment the same day, and was diagnosed with Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA), a type of diabetes which bridges both…