Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

When Igor Dobrianskyi looks at a car dealership lot, he sees a wasted opportunity. “Millions and millions of used cars are sitting on parking lots, depreciating and losing value,” Dobrianskyi said in a recent interview, adding that there are 76,000 dealerships in the United States. “At the same time, there are people who need a car for a few months, but the options are actually very limited and expensive.” Dobrianskyi’s new startup, MyMonthlyCar, aims to connect both sides of that equation through an online platform that offers flexible month-to-month rentals from local dealerships. MyMonthlyCar was selected for the 2026 Startup…

Cohere has released Embed 5, a new embedding model family. It targets enterprise search, RAG, and agentic retrieval. The model family ships in 2 tiers. Embed 5 Pro targets maximum retrieval quality. Embed 5 Fast targets latency and cost on the live query path. Both accept text, images, and fused text plus image inputs. Both cover 100+ languages and read up to 128K tokens. The key design choice: Pro and Fast share 1 embedding space. You can index with one and query with the other. Is it deployable today? Yes, both tiers are generally available on the Cohere API and…

Zero Trust principles are now commonplace in enterprise infrastructure; organizations have spent years investing in measures that secure identities and systems against sophisticated attacks. However, human error is still a readily exploitable path into even hardened organizations, particularly where trust is established manually. Onboarding and service desk processes are a natural pressure point where agents may need to make high-impact access decisions with limited context, while attackers only need to convince one person that they are who they claim to be. For an established user, agents have plenty of ways to verify identity. A new employee typically hasn’t set those…

The Financial Conduct Authority opened its authorization gateway for the new UK crypto rules on Sept. 30, starting an application window that can protect existing Bitcoin providers’ ability to keep serving UK customers and take new business if approval is still pending when the full regime begins.The window closes Feb. 28, 2027. The full regime starts Oct. 25, 2027, according to the FCA’s announcement. February is the deadline for qualifying for the saving provision, a temporary protection for pending applicants, rather than a date when Bitcoin services must immediately stop. Related ReadingFCA finalizes UK crypto rules as firms face 2027…

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have created a new optical-neural processor that uses light to help identify deepfake videos quickly and accurately. Unlike conventional systems that typically examine videos one after another using digital hardware, the UCLA technology can analyze 15 or more video streams at the same time. The key difference is that part of the detection process takes place through the physical propagation of light. This allows many videos to be evaluated simultaneously during a single optical pass rather than requiring each one to move separately through a conventional digital processing pipeline. The technology…

Gabon passed a decree this year requiring benefit sharing for commercial uses of the medicinal plant iboga, its derivatives, and associated traditional knowledge, but the mechanisms for distributing those benefits are still being built.A community association in Ogooué-Ivindo province earned the equivalent of about $50,000 from three legal iboga shipments since 2023, yet its promised share of value created further downstream has still not arrived.The decree is unusually broad, attempting to cover ibogaine, analogs, and compounds made through synthetic or alternative sources, although how Gabon could enforce those claims abroad remains unresolved.In September, Gabon moved to halt exports of…

Northern Lights, a joint venture (JV) encompassing Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, has signed an agreement with Öresundskraft Kraft & Värme, owned by the City of Helsingborg, for the transport of CO2 from a waste-to-energy plant in Sweden to Norway for storage under the seabed.The CO2 will be captured and liquefied at Öresundskraft’s Filbornaverket waste-to-energy facility in Helsingborg before being transported by truck to the Port of Halland in Halmstad. From here, Northern Lights will transport the CO2 by ship to the receiving terminal in Øygarden, Norway, for injection and storage in a designated North Sea reservoir 2,600 meters below the…

Earlier this week, several viral social media posts and news articles stated that Google had updated satellite imagery over Gaza. The imagery shared in these posts and articles shows several areas, including the southern city of Rafah. Huge destruction is detailed in the images, including what appears to be entire neighbourhoods flattened But the imagery wasn’t entirely new.  A Google spokesperson told Bellingcat that they regularly updated third-party satellite images and that the latest Gaza imagery had actually been available since June 2026.  Tomorrow’s front page 📰New satellite pictures lay bare Israel’s destruction of Gaza pic.twitter.com/E65GXUHwrG— The National (@ScotNational) September…

The commercial space market is booming after years of surviving on the fringes of a government-dominated industry. The monster SpaceX initial public offering earlier this year demonstrated the deep interest that public markets have in the industry, and a constellation of companies, building everything from satellites to rockets, has matured in its wake. There is a massive incoming problem, however—all of this industry is dependent on the ability to cheaply and reliably move cargo into space, and that is about to get a lot less certain. SpaceX has been synonymous with both launch capacity and infrastructure for years because it…

TA419 hackers used deceptive tactics, impersonating real figures like a former White House AI officialPublished On 1 Oct 20261 Oct 2026Chinese hackers have been impersonating artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the United States, including a former government official, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.The report, released on Thursday, found that in July, a China-aligned hacking group called TA419 targeted a slate of US policy experts by impersonating prominent figures, including Lynne Edwards Parker, the former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listThe hackers, who…