Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Fastino Labs has released GLiNER2.5-Decide, a 340M-parameter open-weight decision model. It takes text and a schema of typed questions and returns structured answers. Each answer comes with a probability distribution, a confidence score, and constraint-feasibility metadata. It targets the frequent judgment calls inside agent pipelines: routing, triage, tool selection, and guardrails. Is it deployable? Yes, the weights ship under Apache 2.0 and install with pip install gliner2. They run on CPU, GPU, or in air-gapped environments. Fastino team also offers hosted inference and fine-tuning through its GLiNER API. What GLiNER2.5-Decide Actually Does GLiNER2.5-Decide is a non-generative classifier. It uses a…

ClickFix has become the most common way attackers get into enterprise networks, and it does it without an exploit, an attachment, or a file on disk. Our new global threat report traces the technique from a novelty in late 2023 to a subscription product with on-chain infrastructure and a state-sponsored user base, and explains why blocking malicious domains is no longer a useful defense. Read the full report here: https://www.ctm360.com/reports/clickfix-beyond A particular kind of security problem no patch will close. ClickFix is one of them. The attack begins with a page that presents a problem the user believes is theirs…

Researchers at the cryptography research firm Alloc Init have proposed a system for bringing Zcash-style private transfers to Bitcoin without requiring a soft fork. The proposal, called Shielded Bitcoin, would conceal transaction amounts, senders, receivers and links to previously spent funds using encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs. The paper was published on Thursday by Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin.The proposal offers a potential path to stronger privacy for Bitcoin users without requiring consensus changes to the base protocol.Instead of having miners enforce the privacy protocol, Shielded Bitcoin would use Bitcoin as “a neutral publication and ordering layer,” the researchers…

Stars can produce powerful shock waves when gas and dust streaming away from them collide with material in the surrounding space. Astronomers have now captured a striking example around the dead star RXJ0528+2838 using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). The discovery is puzzling because, based on known mechanisms, this small stellar remnant should not be capable of producing the structure seen around it. The unexpected finding challenges current ideas about how dead stars exchange matter and energy with their surroundings. “We found something never seen before and, more importantly, entirely unexpected,” says Simone Scaringi, associate professor…

In June, a team of researchers working in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park spotted a Ghana cuckooshrike, a bird that hadn’t been seen in 13 years.The bird’s home range in West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest has been whittled away by logging and agriculture, leaving a patchwork of disconnected forests.The ‘rediscovery’ shows the value of conserving places like Taï, where mining and illegal hunting also pose threats.The finding relied on close collaboration with West African researchers, the experience and knowledge of the team, and the Ghana cuckooshrike’s listing by the Search for Lost Birds partnership.See All Key Ideas When…

As far as most of the world is concerned, the Republic of Somaliland doesn’t exist. That’s inconvenient, because this nonexistent country now sits right next to one of the world’s most high-profile conflict zones, with massive repercussions for the global economy. Somaliland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, commonly known by the nickname Irro, was in Washington in mid-September before heading to New York this week to make the case for the United States to recognize—or at least more formally engage with—the de facto state that, as far as official U.S. policy is concerned, is a breakaway province in northern Somalia. Somaliland…

CNN and MS NOW reporters say they have been denied entry to cover a White House state dinner despite a judge ruling their access to the grounds must be restored.A federal judge said in an overnight ruling that the White House ban on three outlets – CNN and MS NOW and Politico – was likely unconstitutional and that the administration must allow them access, for now. Trump barred them last week, accusing them of “fake news”.Journalists with the three outlets were allowed back in on Thursday morning. Then in the evening, a CNN reporter and a producer and an MS…

Pressed on whether he had any principled objection to the technology, he declared, “I’m quite willing and happy to learn,” he added. “I feel it’s my moral duty also to use it so that I have personal experience, and I hope it helps me with my work.”   Speaking on the fringes of Axel Springer’s WELT AI Summit in Berlin, Czerny called on European politicians and bishops to respond more clearly to warnings about the risks of frontier AI models forfeiting human control and oversight.   “There should be a dialogue between the bishops and the European governments to express the concern of the population to handle…

The significance of residual hormone production may decrease over time. Still, says Walter Rocca, a professor of epidemiology and neurology at the Mayo Clinic, that doesn’t mean the ovary has become unimportant.“I am convinced until proven otherwise that removing ovaries even after menopause is not advisable,” he says, with a caveat for women at an increased risk of ovarian cancer.Just how long that importance persists after menopause is still an open question, says Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the Menopause Society. It’s also unclear, she says, how much the answer may vary from woman to woman. “We just have huge…

Black Forest Labs (BFL), the lab behind the FLUX image models, has released FLUX 3 Action. It is a 7B open-weights World Action Model (WAM) for robot control. The model reads camera frames, robot state and a text instruction. It then predicts future video frames and the next chunk of actions together. On the RoboLab-120 leaderboard, it ranks first at 42.92% task success. Is it deployable? Yes, with conditions. The DROID policy needs about 32 GB of GPU memory in BF16 on an H200. It fits 24 GB cards with FP8 quantization and text encoder offload. The FLUX Kommunity License…