Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

David Gewirtz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Claude turns narrated screen recordings into reusable skills.My skill cut hours of tedious research to just 30 minutes.The tradeoffs: high usage, slow runs, and fragile control.Last month, Anthropic announced a new Claude Cowork feature: the ability to narrate a screen recording and turn it into a Claude skill. I tried it and, well, as they say, “All magic comes with a price.” Let’s set the stage by defining what we’re after here. A skill is a very detailed canned prompt that can be run like a…

ByteDance’s Seed team has introduced SeedRealtime, a native audio-visual full-duplex LLM. The model fuses audio, video and text in a single unified architecture. It interacts in real time over continuous multimodal streams, rather than one turn at a time. Seed positions it as a step toward omni-modal interaction, and claims three breakthroughs: joint audio-visual understanding, proactive interaction, and natural conversational timing. The architectural target is the cascade: chained ASR, VLM and TTS modules that add latency and lose information between stages. SeedRealtime instead runs perception, understanding, decision-making and expression in parallel inside one end-to-end model. Turn-taking moves inside the model…

A member of “The Com,” a loose-knit online cybercrime collective that targets children and teenagers, has been sentenced to two years in prison for blackmail and sextortion offenses against nearly 120 victims worldwide. 20-year-old Justin Swaddle from Leeds (known as ‘Epstein’, ‘Rugen’ and ‘Moscow’ on Snapchat, Telegram, and Discord) was first arrested in October 2023 by West Yorkshire Police. Swaddle was sentenced today after pleading guilty to multiple child sexual abuse offenses and blackmail at Leeds Crown Court on July 2. “Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out…

Strategy, which holds the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury, sold BTC for the second week in a row to repurchase its STRC preferred stock.The company sold 1,690 Bitcoin for $108.6 million between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, according to a Monday 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).Strategy used the proceeds to buy back 1.15 million shares of its STRC preferred stock for $108.6 million. STRC is a variable-rate preferred stock designed to pay monthly dividends.The transaction marked Strategy’s fourth disclosed Bitcoin sale of 2026, bringing its total Bitcoin sales for the year to 6,948 BTC, while the…

Citations Ballotpedia. Hall Pass – May 6, 2026. C.C. Miller and S. Mervosh. How much screen time is your child getting at school? We asked 350 teachers. New York Times. Published online November 12, 2025. R.D. Silverman et al. The effects of educational technology interventions on literacy in elementary school: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research. Vol. 95, October 2025, p. 972. doi: 10.3102/00346543241261073 A.E. Flanigan et al. The interplay among digital distraction, self-regulation of learning tendencies and motivational influences: A transnational investigation. The Internet and Higher Education. Vol. 67, October 2025, p. 101023, doi: 10.1016/j.iheduc.2025.101023 M. West. An Ed-Tech…

Gabon has ended its 19-year fisheries partnership with the European Union, which allowed EU industrial vessels to target tuna in Gabonese waters in exchange for payment, arguing the agreement no longer serves the country’s economic interests. The decision follows a June 2025 Council of Ministers meeting at which the government announced it would seek to renegotiate the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA), before formally ending it on June 29, 2026. In a statement last year, the Gabonese government said the massive exploitation of fishery resources wasn’t commensurate with the returns Gabon should receive in exchange. In a speech…

Reading Time: 5 minutes Wisconsin: It’s time to winnow the field. Tuesday is the state’s partisan primary election, where voters will choose the candidates to represent the major political parties during the general election this November. There are important races up and down the ballot on Tuesday, but the top contest is Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Seven names will appear on the ballot, but only four are still running for the party’s nomination after a chaotic summer that saw multiple candidates drop out of the race, a historically rare endorsement from Gov. Tony Evers of Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley…