Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As reports of OpenAI’s models breaking containment, hacking sites, and generally getting out of control pile up, the company has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models. The decision was made after a model being tested within a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access. The incident happened on September 20th, and “All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use” remains paused as of Saturday evening, September 25th.In addition, OpenAI revealed on Friday that its agents had inappropriately uploaded 53nimages from ChatGPT users to image-hosting sites. The company has not stated if the images were AI-generated,…

The way we talk about AI agents is shifting, and the way we implement them requires an even more fundamental shift. While earlier discourse focused on how quickly organizations could stand up agents and how much productivity they could promise, a string of recent incidents, including a widely discussed intrusion at Hugging Face during an evaluation of OpenAI agents, has spurred organizations to examine whether speed has outpaced the ability to secure what gets deployed. Security teams are increasingly asking what an agent can reach once it’s running, and whether anyone would notice before it mattered. However tempting it may…

“Throughout 2026, Binance has consistently captured the largest share of USDC spot trading activity, processing $5 million-$10 billion in daily volume, roughly 10-20 times more than most other trading venues, which typically stay below $0.5 billion,” said Anastasia Melachrinos, head of research at Kaiko.Other major exchanges have remained broadly within their previous USDC trading ranges, according to Kaiko, suggesting Binance itself has driven much of the increase.“As Binance accelerates USDC’s reach in emerging markets, that dominance is likely to grow even further,” Melachrinos said.More pressure on TetherUSDC has a market capitalization of about $74 billion, making it the second-largest U.S.…

An estimated 700,000 people took over the Champs-Élysées avenue and the Place de la Concorde public square in the heart of Paris on Saturday to see Pope Leo XIV celebrate an open-air Mass, the biggest event of his four-day visit to France – his first official papal trip to the country.  Before the service, the 71-year-old leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics rode down the avenue in his open-top “popemobile” and waved to crowds pressed tightly against security barriers. Phones in hands raised as high as possible as onlookers tried to catch a lasting glimpse of this fleeting but…

Meta’s Muse mascot is named Jolly. It’s an adorable, cuddly representation of Meta’s AI agent that you can dress however you want—like a doll. At the company’s recent Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s furry Muse donned a toga and laurel wreath. In Instagram ads I saw for Muse, the mascot wore exercise gear and boasted about helping with my fitness goals. Later this year, Meta plans to sell a Tamagotchi-style device for your Muse character. It’s all very kawaii-coded.Although Muse’s ability to complete digital tasks rocketed it to the top of the app charts, its Labubu-adjacent mascot latched this…

Ravie LakshmananSep 26, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security Google is warning of renewed mass exploitation of a known security vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft as part of a campaign targeting multiple sectors globally. The ShinyHunters-linked activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-35273 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The vulnerability was first exploited as a zero-day in attacks against academic institutions to conduct reconnaissance, deploy remote access software like MeshCentral agent for persistence, move laterally over SSH, run a shell script to connect via SSH to other internal PeopleSoft machines using known username/password combinations, and…

MAXYZ, a group of former Balancer contributors, is asking for up to 6 million currently non-circulating BAL to seed a successor protocol. If the granted tokens reach other eligible holders before Balancer’s proposed wind-down redemption snapshot, the same treasury would be divided among more BAL. In exchange, MAXYZ proposes a contingent allocation from a future fork to the Balancer treasury, an asset with no realized value today.The fork proposal, posted Sept. 20 and expanded in a Sept. 23 FAQ, sits beside a separate wind-down plan to let BAL holders burn their tokens for a pro rata share of the DAO’s…

Breast cancer screening can sometimes identify cancers that would never have caused symptoms or threatened a woman’s health during her lifetime. This phenomenon is known as overdiagnosis, and it has long been considered one of the potential drawbacks of screening. For decades, researchers have debated how often overdiagnosis actually occurs. Estimates from randomized trials have differed sharply, with some studies suggesting that 30-50% of breast cancers detected through screening could fall into this category. Those figures have influenced international discussions about both the benefits and possible harms of population-based breast cancer screening. “The aim of our study was to bring…

Claim: Videos authentically show Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wearing a Palestinian flag at a United Nations event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rating: In September 2026, as the United Nations held its annual meeting in New York, a video (archived) circulated online that social media users claimed showed Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wearing a Palestinian flag at a United Nations event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One X user shared the video, writing:   BREAKING:📷  Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni:”I am a woman and also a mother. I cannot stand with someone who kills innocent children.”  The…

The Pennsylvania department of health (DOH) announced on Friday that 55 new measles cases had been reported in the state since Wednesday, with officials continuing efforts to contain an outbreak of the disease that has spread across dozens of counties.In a news release, the DOH said that 890 measles cases had been confirmed across 39 counties in the state so far for the year. The outbreak had resulted in 173 hospitalizations in the state and four measles-associated deaths, the statement added.State health officials said fewer than 1% of reported cases have occurred among individuals vaccinated against measles. And according to…