Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe global mergers and acquisitions boom has hit a surprising sector — the American university system. Higher education is the country’s sixth-largest export, but the number of institutions is shrinking. If the Trump administration has its way, it will get much smaller still.Last month, the administration announced new rules designed to speed up the consolidation of the sector. As education under-secretary Nicholas Kent put it in June, “there are 6,000 institutions of higher education in this country, and not all…

When a loved one dies, who downloads their important files from their cloud storage account? Who monitors their email inbox? Who decides what happens to the photos and videos on their social media accounts? And what if those tasks fall to you?Everyone will die, but not everyone has planned what they want to happen with their digital assets after they’re gone. Even when someone makes a plan, survivors might still be limited in what they can do.Tying up loose ends can become a nightmare for the living, especially when the volume of digital assets is enormous. Still, the more you…

“There were way too many general-purpose layer twos, which frankly don’t make sense as a product, because there’s no reason to have many, many versions of the same thing,” Ben Fisch, CEO of Espresso Systems, told CoinDesk. “We’re in a consolidation phase for general-purpose layer twos, not layer twos broadly.”Industry leaders argue the shakeout reflects a broader shift across crypto rather than a problem unique to Ethereum scaling networks.”Consolidation is happening across all of crypto right now, not just layer two, from DeFi protocols to DEXs and infrastructure providers. It’s a sign that the industry is maturing. The networks continuing…

Archaeologists working at several sites in southern Africa have uncovered hundreds of unusual pieces of engraved ostrich eggshell. More than 60,000 years old, these fragments were created by groups of Homo sapiens living in the region. A new study led by researchers at the University of Bologna suggests that the markings were far more organized than simple scratches or improvised decorations. Published in PLOS One, the research finds that the engravings followed recurring geometric principles involving parallel lines, right-angle relationships, and repeated regular patterns. “These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking,” says Silvia Ferrara, Professor at the…

Published On 9 Aug 20269 Aug 2026Sahar Al-Bardini prepares breakfast for her three children in a tent at the Al-Zawaida camp in central Gaza. She watches them eat but is already worried about finding their next meal.The 35-year-old is the sole breadwinner for six-year-old Omar, four-year-old Sama and Mahmoud aged three since her husband was killed in Israeli shelling of northern Gaza three years ago.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listLike many families in Gaza, they are struggling with soaring food prices, largely due to Israel’s long-running siege, with concerns that the population could be plunged into famine again.During…

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed spoke by phone with former President Barack Obama on Friday, days after winning the Democratic primary race for Senate in Michigan, according to their representatives.Mr. Obama and Dr. El-Sayed, who narrowly prevailed in a divisive primary after campaigning on a progressive and anti-establishment platform, discussed unifying the party before the November general election in Michigan, Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign said.“I’d like to keep private conversations private, but it was a really, really warm conversation,” Dr. El-Sayed said of the call during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, adding: “It was just really an…

More than half the accounts that posted on Elon Musk’s X about the rioting in Belfast and the civil disorder in Southampton in June were based outside the UK, an analysis by the Guardian can reveal.Of the 8,672 accounts whose combined posts about the events exceeded 1,000 views, just 45.3% were shown as from the UK, according to the social media platform’s own location function.One in six (16.8%) came from the US, 4.5% from Ireland, and about a quarter from all European countries other than the UK.Seven of the 12 most-read tweets about Belfast and Southampton came from the US…

Maria Diaz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysWi-Fi 7 is finally becoming popular.With that trend, overall internet speeds are picking up.You can now buy Wi-Fi 7 routers for reasonable prices. I love Wi-Fi 7. It’s fast enough to keep up with my AT&T Fiber 2 Gbps internet connection, and when deployed with my Netgear Orbi 970 mesh network, it can cover my 5,000-square-foot home/office even with its thick plaster walls. However, in the two years since Wi-Fi 7’s commercial launch, not many people joined me. For all Wi-Fi 7’s virtues, Wi-Fi 7 gear was also relatively…

Ravie LakshmananAug 07, 2026Cybercrime / Vulnerability A new analysis has uncovered that the threat actor tracked as TeamPCP has been active on the cybercrime scene as far back as 2020, indicating the group has been compromising internet-facing infrastructure for years before training their sights on the software supply chain. “The connection is supported by overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, staging techniques, backend infrastructure, and operational tradecraft,” Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz said. This includes two campaigns observed in the second half of 2025: ShadowRay 2.0 (aka IronErn), which involved hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure into a self-propagating…

In brief Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 left its test sandbox and went onto the open internet, security firm Frontier Security said. The model probed the sandbox’s network settings, found reachable sites and pulled its test answers from GitHub. Frontier says a misconfiguration opened the door, but that Kimi’s own guardrails did not stop it. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 left the sandbox it was being tested in and went onto the open internet to find answers to problems it had been set, according to security firm Frontier Security.The model was being assessed on defensive cybersecurity skills and was expressly tasked with…