Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Former OpenAI alignment researcher Naomi Bashkansky said she resigned from the AI company on July 23 and joined Conduit the next day as a founding researcher. At Conduit, she will work on models designed to turn non-invasive neural recordings into text that can direct AI agents, a goal her essay calls “telepathy.” Related ReadingOpenAI co-founders quit amid Musk’s legal firestormThe firm’s leadership exits have renewed focus on the firm’s AI safety practices. Aug 6, 2024 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo Bashkansky said she spent about 1.5 years at OpenAI, and described the new role in an Aug. 4 essay. She predicted that…

In 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.  Since that 1970 law and its amendments were passed, combined emissions of a half dozen harmful air pollutants from vehicles and industrial sources have decreased by nearly 80 percent.  But mounting evidence shows that pollution from wildfire smoke is eclipsing those air-quality gains. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels is creating warmer, drier conditions that make wildfires more intense and destructive, and blanket communities in…

There is something deeply incongruous about a penal system centred on incarceration having to release prisoners early because it has run out of room to incarcerate them (PM to tighten early release rules but men jailed over PC Harper’s death can be freed, 4 August).The government’s latest early-release measures may be necessary to prevent our prisons from becoming completely overwhelmed, but they are surely a symptom of a much deeper failure. We appear to be operating a revolving-door policy: tougher sentencing fills the prisons, overcrowding forces early release, public concern produces calls for tougher sentencing, and the cycle begins again.…

A student shot several people at a high school north of Thailand’s capital on Friday, killing three teachers and three students and wounding several others, police said. The shooting happened at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Nonthaburi province northwest of Bangkok. The ​gunman shot and ​killed ‌his ⁠grandparents at ‌their home Friday morning before ⁠opening fire at the ​school on ‌Bangkok’s outskirts, police said. He fired 26 rounds and another 34 ​rounds of ​ammunition were ​found at the ​scene, police said in a statement. Royal Thai Police spokesperson Trairong Piwpan said the motive for the attack was still being investigated. He…

Older readers may remember when in 2017 — back when the EU was entirely in black and white — then-European Parliament President Antonio Tajani wrote to Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker to point out that the Parliament was taking its summer break, and that no work should be sent over before early September. Tajani’s note was dated July 13. A note from our Irony Department: This column is off next week as I’m on vacation. Although, as Tuscany is out of my price range, I’ll be vacationing at the Schuman roundabout instead. But if major events happening while you’re on a…

Alan Milburn is guiding a metal loop along the serpentine wire of an electrical buzzer game as he explains the challenge of Britain’s youth jobs crisis. “We have got more than a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet). Crisis is an over-used word – but this is a crisis.”On a fact-finding trip to Dublin, the former UK cabinet minister is being shown around an Irish Rail training facility. He tells the apprentices who rigged up the game that, while things are bad in Britain, Ireland is on the right track.“It’s about half the rate here, it’s…

Primary schools in England should be required to identify children at risk of leaving education at 16 without finding a job, a government review is to recommend.Alan Milburn, who is leading a review into Britain’s crisis in youth worklessness, said he would call for sweeping changes in education policy alongside a shake-up of the benefits system to address the problem.Speaking to the Guardian, he said ministers needed to “make somebody responsible” for identifying and supporting the children who risked becoming Neet (not in employment, education or training) after their GCSE year up to the age of 24.“The warning signs are…

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysPixel 11 prices may rise by $100 or more across the series, challenging their reputation for value.  Samsung often wins on hardware, while Pixel leads on software. Pixel Drops and early Android updates are the real value.Google’s Pixel phones have, for quite some time, been premium enough to compete with Samsung’s best phones, but they were usually a bit cheaper. That made overlooking any performance or hardware gaps very easy.But the Pixel 11 series will be different. Also: Google’s Ask Maps may be more exciting than the new Pixel…

Microsoft has open sourced code-testing-generator, a polyglot agent that writes unit tests and then proves they work. It ships in the dotnet-test plugin inside the MIT-licensed dotnet/skills repository. The agent targets a gap that coding assistants usually leave open. A prompt like ‘generate unit tests’ does not say which framework, file location or assertions to use. code-testing-generator settles those decisions by reading the repository before it writes anything. It then plans, writes, runs and checks the tests it produces. On Microsoft’s internal 152-task benchmark, it completed 140 tasks against 120 for stock GitHub Copilot. Both setups used the same model…

An authorization bypass in Paperclip could have allowed remote attackers to obtain arbitrary code execution with the server’s permissions, Oasis Security reports. Paperclip is an AI management platform that allows organizations to operate autonomous AI agents at scale. It supports importing companies from portable bundles and YAML files that also define agents and commands they should execute. Tracked as CVE-2026-41679 (CVSS score of 10), the critical security defect impacted network-accessible Paperclip instances with default authenticated-mode configurations. A missing authorization check could be exploited to self-register an account without email verification, sign in to the account, create a CLI challenge and…