Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

After images that users uploaded to OpenAI models were included in training data, AI agents operating in the company’s research environment posted them on public image hosting sites. Fifty-three “user-provided images” were “posted to image-hosting sites as links that weren’t publicly listed,” the company said for the first time. The images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed. “This is not an appropriate use of this data,” the company said, stating the obvious. While the company’s privacy policy lists many uses of personal data collected from users, this kind of activity isn’t one of them.…

A Kosovar national has pleaded guilty to operating Rydox, a large illegal online marketplace that sold stolen personal information, login credentials, credit card details, and cybercrime tools. Kosovo law enforcement and Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Body (SPAK) arrested 28-year-old Ardit Kutleshi and two other Rydox administrators (Jetmir Kutleshi and Shpend Sokoli) in December 2024. The arrests were part of a joint international law enforcement operation that also shut down the Rydox marketplace, seized the Rydox[.]cc domain, and seized its servers in Kuala Lumpur with the help of the Royal Malaysian Police. Ardit Kutleshi was extradited from Kosovo to the United States…

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has submitted her formal resignation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, effective Oct. 2.Peirce, also known as “Crypto Mom” amid her advocacy of clear, rules-based regulation of the crypto industry, posted a copy of her resignation letter on her X account Friday.In the letter, she thanked the president for the “honor of her professional lifetime” serving as a commissioner and said she was leaving the SEC under the excellent leadership of Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda, the two remaining members, who are both Republicans.Peirce served on the commission for about eight years. Since…

Ring, the Amazon subsidiary of camera-enabled doorbells fame, wants to be an even bigger part of your neighbourhood. Next month in the UK, it will be launching Neighbours, a community app that seeks to replace the now traditional neighbourhood Facebook or WhatsApp group. It will be available inside the Ring app, free to everybody, including people without Ring products, and will include a community requests feature wherein the police can ask for footage from residents living near reported crimes, who can then choose whether or not to share it.My first thought was that this is curtain-twitching culture gone mad. If…

At least two people have died and four more are missing after an explosion destroyed a building housing a holiday rental property in the historic centre of Athens.The blast happened in the Plaka area of the Greek capital, a neighbourhood close to tourist sites such as the Acropolis, with local media reporting the building housed a holiday rental.An American man and woman have died, with two more US tourists missing, AFP news agency reported citing local officials. A Greek national and UK national who lived in the building are also said to be missing.Pictures from the scene showed emergency service…

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face have told the UN that the current pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development, and the risks it poses to society, demands international coordination.Altman called for common risk evaluation standards, as did Dario Amodei of Anthropic, a main rival of OpenAI, and Clement Delangue of Hugging Face.Earlier this month, Amodei wrote an essay welcomed by Altman and others calling an AI development slowdown in response to fears about the technology’s threat to humanity. However, at the same UN conference, a key technology advisor to US President Donald Trump, rejected the idea any new…

Ravie LakshmananSep 26, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security Details have emerged about a high-severity security flaw in the Elementor Website Builder WordPress plugin that could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to create rogue administrator accounts and take control of a site. The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability, which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 8.8 out of 10.0. It only affects versions 4.3.0 and 4.3.1 of the plugin, which is active on over 10 million WordPress sites. Statistics from WordPress.org show that the two impacted versions alone have been installed on more than 2…

In brief Google disclosed PageBreak, an internal AI agent from its Product Security team that has found more than 500 bugs. Unlike typical AI scanners, PageBreak only reports a bug after confirming it with a working exploit against a live environment, giving it a near-zero false-positive rate. Google plans to pair PageBreak with CodeMender, its automated bug-fixing agent. Google just gave one of its AI agents a new job: breaking into Google.The company disclosed on September 24 that its Product Security team built an autonomous system called PageBreak, designed to hunt for real, exploitable vulnerabilities in Google’s own web applications,…

BALI — Indonesia. Wayan Wardika used to see “clouds of fireflies” as a child growing up among the rice fields of Bali, Indonesia. But 40 years later, he realized that the fireflies in his village had all but disappeared.Fireflies in Southeast Asia are vanishing due to habitat loss, light pollution, pesticide use, and climate change—and the same is happening in rapidly developing Bali. Which is a loss for us all, as fireflies are both ecologically and culturally significant.In 2020, Wayan decided to bring the fireflies back, by launching Indonesia’s only firefly conservation initiative called Bring Back the Light. He and…

Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2026, social media users shared a clip purportedly showing him saying “America deserved 9/11” as he shook his finger in the air.  The clip was authentic, meaning it wasn’t generated with artificial intelligence or digitally altered. A longer video of Netanyahu’s speech, however, showed he was not expressing his personal belief but rather quoting the left-leaning influencer Hasan Piker. Piker truly made that statement during a live stream in 2019. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on…