Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Apple’s new texture and grain controls for stylizing photos will be more limited on older phones than initially expected.A confusingly worded press release from Apple indicated that the new features, announced alongside the iPhone 18 and 18 Pro earlier this month, would be “available” on older devices like the iPhone 16 and iPhone Air that “support the latest generation of Photographic Styles.”But it turns out that “available” didn’t mean that older iPhone models would have full access to those new features.Making texture adjustments to enhance or smooth a subject’s skin and adding film grain will only be an option when…

Voice input on phones has been solved for years. What has not been solved is the output. Speak into most dictation tools and you get back exactly what you said, fillers and false starts included, in a note you then have to clean up and move somewhere else. SpeakON attacks that gap with hardware: a 25 g magnetic button that snaps to the back of an iPhone, carries its own microphone, and writes finished text straight into whatever app is already open. The Positioning: a Communicator, not a Dictation App SpeakON calls the category an AI Communicator, and takes its…

D-Link warned customers of a maximum-severity vulnerability (CVE-2026-86296) with public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code and no patch, affecting legacy DIR-822A dual-band Wi-Fi routers. This security flaw stems from a stack-based buffer overflow and improper data handling in the DHCP server component and can be exploited without authentication or user interaction. Attackers without valid credentials on the same local network can send crafted DHCP packets to the device, trigger the overflow, and potentially crash the DHCP daemon or achieve remote code execution on targeted devices. D-Link also warned that the security researcher who found and reported the issue published a proof-of-concept…

In brief Polish prosecutors have charged a former police officer with organized crime membership, fraud and money laundering linked to the case of collapsed exchange Zondacrypto. Police are searching the fuel depot where Zondacrypto founder Sylwester Suszek was last seen before vanishing in March 2022. At least five others have been charged since August in a case that has drawn several thousand complaints from clients of the exchange. Polish prosecutors have charged a former police officer over the collapsed Zondacrypto exchange, as investigators search the fuel depot where its founder was last seen before he disappeared four years ago.Officers from…

Engineers have created a new type of concrete that is stronger than conventional concrete while also capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The findings, reported in Carbon Research, suggest that adding carefully selected natural materials could give concrete a second role beyond construction by helping remove CO2 from the surrounding air. Researchers at Mepco Schlenk Engineering College in India developed the mixture as a possible way to make construction materials more sustainable. Their approach targets a major environmental challenge: rising atmospheric CO2 levels driven in large part by fossil fuel use and cement production. The team, led by Srinivasan Revathi,…

Energy and marine consultancy ABL, part of Oslo-listed global consultancy group Aqualis, has been hired by Switzerland-based offshore contractor Allseas to support the lifting of a massive 60,000-ton topside in a single motion as part of a North Sea decommissioning project on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). Statfjord A platform; Credit: Harald Pettersen/Equinor ABL has been selected by Allseas as marine warranty surveyor (MWS) for the single-lift removal of Equinor’s Statfjord A topside. The Swiss player is the offshore contractor undertaking the engineering, preparation, removal and disposal (EPRD) of the concrete gravity-base production platform in the North Sea. Since Allseas’ Pioneering…

Every year, millions of complaints flow to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from people across the country. The complaints, which range in focus from debt collection to credit reporting to payday loans and more, long served as a window into Americans’ gripes and struggles with various companies. For over a decade, consumers could opt in to have what they wrote published as public information in a CFPB database. But last month, the Trump administration announced that it would stop publishing those complaint narratives, a decision that aligns the agency with corporations that have critiqued the system for years.  “Publishing…

Paul Krugman put up a nice post on his Substack last week, pointing out how other countries are rapidly losing their fear of U.S. President Donald Trump and starting to join forces and push back against his erratic and predatory approach to foreign policy. He’s right, but what caught my eye was when Krugman cited Niccolo Machiavelli’s dictum that to be a successful prince, “it is better to be feared than loved.” Ideally, a prince should seek to be both, but Machiavelli observes that this feat is hard to pull off. If one must choose, therefore, being feared is preferable…

Israel rebuked French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday after he criticised Israeli actions in the West Bank in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly. In his last speech as president addressing the UN’s signature annual diplomatic gathering, Macron deplored the humanitarian situation in Gaza – from which Hamas led the October 7, 2023 attack, the deadliest ever against Israel – as well as actions by Israel in the West Bank. Read moreMacron urges world to ‘stand firm’ against ‘abuse of power by empires’ in final UN speech Macron said that “Hamas has never struck in the West Bank,”…

The Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), which helps farmers to manage land in environmentally-friendly ways, criticised the “frantic scramble” and said farmers had “faced a desperate race against time” to secure their funding agreements.Cambridgeshire arable farmer Martin Lines, who leads the NFFN, said: “This entire SFI system, with windows opening and closing within a few hours, isn’t fit for purpose. “We need to find a better way based on continuous, whole-farm agreements, not doors that slam shut on day one because the money has already gone.”He pointed out that after years of extreme weather, many farmers were relying on the…