Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

An artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI “infiltrated” an Australian government website in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.The agent hacked a statistics portal containing “non-sensitive” data from Australia’s universal healthcare scheme Medicare, Albanese said in New York on Wednesday, local time.He had a “very frank discussion” with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for taking “too long” to tell them about the breach, believed to be one of the world’s first publicly reported AI-led hacks of a government website.OpenAI said it only became aware of the incident in August “during an ongoing review” of “misaligned model activity”, and told Australian…

Defence contractors have promised to create 40,000 apprenticeships, work experience placements and jobs for young people each year, as Wes Streeting claimed to be overseeing a “ministry for growth”.Labour is keen to demonstrate that the rapid increase in defence spending planned for the coming years, which may necessitate tax rises, will result in jobs in the UK.In particular, Streeting said he was determined the defence industry should play its part in tackling what he called the “moral emergency” of almost 1 million 16-to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (Neet).“I think we have a responsibility, as we’re investing more…

Teenagers are to be offered a range of new vocational GCSEs under a radical shake-up of the school system in England designed to tackle a crisis that has left nearly a million young people out of work or training.From 2029, pupils will be able to supplement compulsory GCSE subjects such as English, maths and sciences with courses such as construction, creative media production and child development, marking the biggest changes to the qualification for more than a decade.The Department for Education (DfE) said the new GCSEs would be two-year courses taken in year 10 and 11, “with nationally set content,…

Meta knows you probably have some privacy concerns about its smart glasses.At its annual Meta Connect event today in Menlo Park, California, the company announced plans to incorporate its siloed AI processing scheme known as Private Processing into its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The feature, designed for WhatsApp last year, allows the glasses’ AI assistant to get to know you and fulfill your requests without Meta accessing any of your data.“Most of the time, glasses are helping you see well, protecting your eyes and complementing your look, and that’s it,” Meta wrote in its press release, perhaps somewhat underselling the…

In this tutorial, we work with Jev, TypeSafe AI’s first System One model, which does not generate text at all: we send it a piece of program state and a set of typed questions, and it returns choices, scores, and yes/no probabilities that our code can branch on directly. We install the official Python SDK, make a first call that uses all three question primitives at once, and look at how the shape of the state changes what the model can know. We then recompute the published confidence statistic from the returned probabilities, measure what batching ten questions into one…

The “third-party.com” domain, commonly used as a placeholder in developer documentation and code examples, is serving a fake Cloudflare verification page that attempts to trick Windows users into executing PowerShell commands. The domain third-party.com has long been used in documentation to represent an arbitrary external website, API, or service, similar to how developers use domains such as example.com. However, unlike example.com, example.net, and example.org, which IANA reserves specifically for documentation, third-party.com is a normally registered domain whose content its owner can control. This difference is now a security concern after the domain began serving a ClickFix attack that impersonates a Cloudflare…

Although the symposium is not secret, it has received little media attention. Its public footprint consists largely of occasional posts from attendees rather than prominent FBI announcements or the publicity campaigns typical of commercial crypto conferences.A LinkedIn post published by Token Recovery executive Roman Bieda confirms that the 2024 symposium took place in Austin. Bieda, attending for a third time, said it convened an international group of public and private-sector specialists to discuss threats including money laundering, ransomware, human trafficking and crypto-related scams. He did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.From government gathering to industry forumThe…

A mass of floating weeds at Chia Lagoon, Malawi’s largest, is choking out waterways and livelihoods as farmers and fishers struggle to access fields and fishing areas. Seven months after the rainy season ended in Malawi, fields that once absorbed seasonal water at the lagoon are submerged, frustrating irrigated maize and rice production, according to farmers. Fishers also said it’s now hard to access fishing grounds as the weeds are blocking boat routes. “We have never seen anything like this,” said Ali Maulidi, who leads an association of more than 1,000 fishers in Nkhotakota district in central Malawi…

Turkey will hand over control of its base in Bashiqa in northern Iraq to Baghdad, the Turkish presidency announced Wednesday in a joint statement with its neighbour. “In light of progress achieved by these security measures implemented by Iraq, Turkish forces will gradually hand over the Bashiqa-Zilkan base to the Federal Government of Iraq in accordance with the agreed mechanism and timetable,” a joint statement said. The announcement followed a meeting Wednesday between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The handover’s timetable was…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned French President Emmanuel Macron after he criticised Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank during his address to the UN General Assembly.”Look at what’s happening in the West Bank, where day in, day out, we are seeing violations. And in the name of what? Hamas was never very active in the West Bank,” Macron said in French, according to the UN’s interpreter.Netanyahu called the remarks a “grotesque absurdity” and said members of the Palestinian armed group there “carry out attacks against Jews almost every day”.There was no response from Macron’s office, but one…