Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Voice assistants handling phone calls is a little more accepted today than back in the Duplex days. Call screening features abound—whether on a Pixel, Samsung, or iPhone, onboard assistants routinely intercept unknown callers to ask why they’re calling.But these kinds of features—much like hyped-up AI translation features—can often fall short. Calls are unpredictable, and the person on the other end may hang up, assuming it’s just another spam call. What happens if Gemini doesn’t understand a person’s accent all that well? Will it trap the clerk in an endless loop of asking them to repeat themselves? And if the shop…

An active ClickFix campaign has been observed compromising legitimate Ukrainian business websites to inject bogus Cloudflare verification pages and trick victims into downloading a previously undocumented information stealer called Psychedelic. “When a visitor interacts with the page, the lure copies a Windows Installer command to the clipboard and instructs the visitor to paste it into the Windows Run dialog,” Arctic Wolf Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix chain uses an “msiexec.exe” command to fetch a Windows MSI installer that’s used to deliver the stealer malware. The malicious tool is designed to harvest browser…

When crypto prices were cut in half between October 2025 and April 2026, the world’s largest institutional investors didn’t sell.  In fact, several bought the dip. That’s the central finding of a new report from Bitwise Asset Management, which interviewed senior allocators at 15 major institutions, including endowments, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices and public companies.  Not one reduced its crypto allocation during the sell-off. And when asked what would make them exit their position, none said a downturn in price.  Every institution in the study that owns crypto owns bitcoin. For nearly all of them, it was…

In this animation, frames of NISAR data from December 2025 to August 2026 show the spread of lava from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. In the image, the lava field appears brighter in the foreground than the surrounding surfaces. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake had struck in the nearby ocean, apparently jolting one of the two volcanoes awake. A few days later,…

Shortly before Congress left for its August recess, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved a bill that would abolish the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). CIGIE is the independent agency responsible for coordinating, training, and setting quality standards for federal inspectors general. The bill, the Restoring Integrity and Efficiency to Inspector General Oversight Act, would transfer CIGIE’s responsibilities to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an agency housed within the White House. It has not yet been scheduled for consideration by the full House of Representatives. CIGIE supports the work of…

Some warnings are so grave that it is almost impossible to fully comprehend them. The descriptions of a super-sized, “Godzilla-level” El Niño already heating our planet would sound hyperbolic were they not issuing from eminent scientists. They say that the weather pattern, which occurs roughly every two to seven years, may be the strongest in at least a millennium. With its peak yet to come, the temperature rise in the Pacific Ocean has already surpassed the previous high.The consequence will be huge amounts of heat in an atmosphere already experiencing frighteningly higher temperatures due to the human-caused climate crisis. Next…

Claim: In September 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a recall of more than 160,000 pounds of beef, pork and goat meat because it was produced without a proper federal inspection. Rating: In September 2026, a claim (archived) circulated online that the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a recall of more than 160,000 pounds of beef, pork and goat meat because it was produced without a proper federal inspection. For example, independent journalist Aaron Parnas shared the claim on Facebook, writing that the USDA issued a “large scale meat recall.” Claims about the recall also spread on X (archived),…

As the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, prepared to deliver his speech at the UN headquarters in New York City on Thursday, hundreds of people blocked traffic on the streets outside, with several people arrested as of early afternoon.The protest outside the UN, one of several this week against the embattled Israeli leader, drew hundreds of Jewish, Palestinian, Iranian and Lebanese New Yorkers, among others, as well as several elected officials and candidates in the November election, and a number of celebrities.Many wore shirts reading “Fund people not bombs” and chanted slogans like “Let Gaza live” and “the whole world…

“There is history. It matters to me. I never believed that the Germans crossed the border several times just for the sake of crossing borders,” Mélenchon said — though he insisted he is not “anti-German.” Berlin aims to become Europe’s predominant military power in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American retrenchment from Europe — a move Mélenchon argued was motivated by economic interests, with Germany hoping that a stronger defense industry can make up for losses from its struggling auto industry. Le Pen is up in arms against the EU budget (and von der Leyen) Standing by…

Australia has said this incident is the first of its kind, and experts agree it might be.As far as we know, hacks carried out by AI agents are still quite rare occurrences – but then again, it is largely up to companies themselves to disclose them.Hacks like this have happened before. In July, OpenAI agents went rogue during a test and infiltrated tech start-up Hugging Face’s internal systems.The AI agents decided that ignoring the limits on what should be done to achieve their goal was the best course of action. This is what the industry calls “misalignment” – broadly defined…