Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Microsoft and Apple on Thursday announced fixes for multiple vulnerabilities across their products. The charge was led by Microsoft, which patched over a dozen vulnerabilities across Active Directory, Azure, Entra, SharePoint, Teams, and other products, including critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) issues. Three of the issues, CVE-2026-63508, CVE-2026-56162, and CVE-2026-65667, have a maximum severity rating of 10/10. Described as missing authentication in Planetary Computer Pro, improper authentication in Azure SQL Database, and missing authorization in Teams, respectively, they could lead to elevation of privilege (EoP) and can be exploited over the network. Four other flaws, CVE-2026-50515 (RCE in Azure Service…

The Clarity Act may be delayed — for now — but pro-crypto senators remain committed to the fight.  And not just Republicans: Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks accompanied conservative “Bitcoin Senator” Cynthia Lummis in assuring voters that work was being done on the bill.  Lawmakers were hoping a crucial vote on the long-awaited crypto market structure bill was to go ahead before a five-week recess but news dropped Friday that it was too little, too late. Now, the Senate will vote on the bill in September.  JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Senator Lummis releases statement now Clarity Act vote is delayed:”There will be…

I recently rewatched Armageddon, complete with Bruce Willis, oil drillers sent into space, and an asteroid the size of Texas racing toward Earth. Beneath all the Hollywood spectacle is a fascinating question: What could humanity actually do with an asteroid if we were able to reach and use one? The most valuable answer may have nothing to do with destroying it. Sorry, Bruce. Asteroids could instead help us build an entirely new world. The Supply Problem Facing Mars Establishing a colony on Mars would involve far more than solving difficult engineering challenges. It would also require a reliable system for…

I read Luke McLaughlin’s article with a great deal of empathy, yet still with some uneasiness about the taboo of having more than one club (Have you ever switched allegiance as a football fan? You are not alone, 1 August). A world I inhabit.I too was at the Millwall v Forest game marred by crowd trouble. It was my first! My family are mostly Millwall, who remain my club, but having seen them drop down the divisions and play in the third tier, my head was turned by better technique and Tottenham- and Arsenal-supporting friends. They will never understand my…

The claim that U.S. President Donald Trump wore a wig, hairpiece or toupee during an appearance in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Aug. 5, 2026, is unproven. The rumor stems from photos and videos of Trump speaking in Las Vegas, where his hair reportedly appeared fuller and redder than in photos from other events or media engagements. Snopes compared various photos of Trump’s hair from the reputable photo agency Getty Images to attempt to investigate the claim. However, due to differences in environments and lighting, it was not possible to definitively conclude whether Trump wore a wig on Aug. 5. Because…

The amount of wasted medicines thrown away in England in one year could fill 75 swimming pools, according to a pharmacy group.The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) estimated that 3,400 tonnes of partly used medicines were disposed of in England in 2024-25.The organisation, which analysed data from regional health bodies, also estimated that the problem costs the NHS at least £480m annually.Olivier Picard, chair of the NPA, said: “Wasted medicines cost the NHS significant sums of money every year that could be invested in better services for patients.“More than this, wasting medicines can have environmental and health consequences, and we can…

The Trump administration has been looking for a current or former Cuban official who could be persuaded to take over the government in Havana as the United States ratchets up its pressure campaign, according to current and former U.S. officials.The plan is more regime alteration than regime change.The Trump administration has pressed its spy agencies to identify someone in the mold of Delcy Rodríguez, who became Venezuela’s interim president after U.S. forces captured the previous leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January.U.S. officials viewed Ms. Rodríguez as a pragmatist who could seamlessly assume power and would be willing to work closely with…

The French authorities have halted small boats at sea in the Channel on 10 occasions since the spring, officials said on Friday.Despite claims from the Conservatives and Reform that the French were refusing to intervene in small boat crossings, maritime prefect officers were using “intervention tactics” to board or control vessels at sea and take asylum seekers back to France.The disclosure comes as political parties are once again attempting to seize the initiative over small boats over the summer.Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, last week confronted French police on a beach near Boulogne and uploaded footage to X of…

There’s something magical about using instant cameras that smartphones can’t match. You can capture a moment, print it out, and then give the photo as a gift or hold onto it. Image quality won’t be all that good, but imperfections are part of the allure.We tested instant camera models from popular brands and landed on a handful that we think are the best. Some aim to preserve the classic experience above all else, while others support companion apps and the ability to print stored photos.Fujifilm’s latest Instax cameras are the best out there for most people. The company’s Instax Mini…

Built by Paige and Microsoft, PRISM2 reads whole-slide images through a perceiver-based encoder trained jointly on tissue tiles and clinical dialogue drawn from pathology reports. The model aggregates thousands of tile embeddings per slide into one representation, then generates text that answers diagnostic questions rather than simply classifying pixels. Training data spans 2.3 million whole-slide images. The dialogue supervision comes from 685,507 pathology reports that Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center collected during routine care, converted into question-and-answer pairs by GPT-4o.Architecture and embedding designThe architecture runs in two distinct phases. Stage one trains the slide encoder itself, teaching it to aggregate tile-level…