Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers’ highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request.The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully.The UK government had made a second request to Apple to grant it a “back door” to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.Britain backed down on its original…

President Trump met with Jeanine Pirro to the White House on Monday, hours after saying that she had “choked” when she concluded that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was not the work of vandals, as the president has claimed.Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., arrived at the White House on Monday afternoon and was taken to meet with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. She was not fired by Mr. Trump, nor did she offer her resignation in that meeting, according to two people briefed on…

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises. The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism. “There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders about Palantir’s outstanding quarter he wrote. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.” To be clear, AI labs…

Malware running as an ordinary user on a Windows machine can sign into a victim’s passkey-protected accounts without a fingerprint, a PIN, or anything at all appearing on the victim’s screen. Unit 42 detailed three attack paths against Chrome’s Google Password Manager cloud authenticator, which it calls Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key; the strongest targets the master key protecting the user’s synced passkeys. None of this breaks the cryptography. The attacks go after the code around the passkey: how Chrome stores its device keys, how it re-enrolls a device after that state disappears, and whether the site you are…

Strategy’s latest Bitcoin sale lifted its 2026 disposals to 5,258 BTC, the largest amount it has sold in any year since adopting the asset in 2020, as the company redirects capital toward supporting its preferred securities.The company sold 1,638 BTC for $104.7 million between July 27 and Aug. 2 and issued about 3.01 million MSTR common shares for another $290.6 million, according to an Aug. 3 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.None of the nearly $395 million raised went toward new Bitcoin purchases. Instead, Strategy used the capital to fund preferred dividends, repurchase STRC shares and complete the…

When atomic nuclei crash into one another at nearly the speed of light, they briefly produce quark-gluon plasma, an extraordinarily hot state of matter in which quarks and gluons can move freely. This exotic material behaves like an almost perfect fluid and offers scientists a way to study conditions similar to those that existed shortly after the Big Bang. Researchers have devoted considerable attention to the plasma’s intense swirling motion and powerful electromagnetic fields. Its acceleration, however, has received far less scrutiny, even though it directly contributes to the fireball’s rapid expansion. In hydrodynamics, acceleration is considered just as fundamental…

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at rumors of U.S.-Iran peace talks, Red Cross access to Myanmar’s imprisoned former leader, and a dangerous heat wave on the Korean Peninsula. ‘Unbelievably Duplicitous’ Iran has denied it is engaging in direct talks with the United States to end months of war—a day after U.S. President Donald Trump called off plans for a massive military strike and said a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was imminent. Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at rumors of U.S.-Iran peace talks, Red Cross access to Myanmar’s imprisoned former leader, and…

President Donald Trump continues to insist damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of vandalism, despite a Department of Justice motion filed on July 31 that placed the blame squarely on a contractor’s “botched” installation of the pool coating “and not vandalism as initially represented” by the Department of Interior. According to a motion from U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to dismiss a felony destruction of property charge against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, it wasn’t until after Hearn was indicted that the Department of Interior provided prosecutors with “additional documents … indicating…

A record-breaking hot and dry summer tightened its grip on Europe Monday, as water-dropping planes swooped over a major wildfire in Greece, firefighters in France sought to stabilize a blaze in Provence, and much of the UK recorded its driest July in nearly two centuries. Wildfires west of Athens jumped containment lines, a day after a midair collision between two helicopters killed two crew members. A Greek and a Danish national died and two others were hospitalised in the helicopter collision. All four were private operators chartered by the Greek firefighting service. In France, firefighters in the region around Bordeaux…

Even by the standards of their rivalry, the speed at which Rupert Lowe’s olive branch to Nigel Farage morphed into fresh recriminations between the two was swift.It began with a softly lit 12-minute video posted on Sunday by the Restore Britain leader, looking straight to camera and referring to “Nigel” as he suggested his party could be willing to cast aside its differences with Reform UK and work together.Despite being suspended by Reform in March 2025, and going on to start his own party to chip away at Farage’s vote, Lowe said the two men should put “personalities and our…