Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Since over $70 million in Bitcoin was stolen yesterday by an attack that exploited a fault in the Coldcard’s system, it has been reported that the thief used a top blockchain services provider for help.  Writing on X Friday, engineer at payments company Block, Clay Garrett, said that the provider — who he did not name at the request of the services provider — had been contacted after finding blockchain movements matched the “suspected workflow” of the attacker.  “During our investigation of the Coldcard drain yesterday, we identified an unusual pattern in the sweeps,” Garrett said.  “That pattern led us…

California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state’s minimum wage will rise to $17.40 next year, a ay floor set to become the highest of any US state.The pay bump will go into effect starting 1 January, Newsom announced on Friday. The state’s current minimum rate is $16.90. In a news release, Newsom touted the move as a salve for working families amid high living costs and took a jab at the Trump administration.“For years, Donald Trump and Republicans have blocked efforts to raise the federal minimum wage while handing tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” Newsom said.The federal…

The European Union will hold emergency talks on Tuesday to discuss the migration crisis in Ceuta after tense exchanges between Spain and other member states.Twenty-two member states issued a joint letter calling for co-ordinated action and the strengthening of the EU’s external borders, after some 60,000 migrants entered the Spanish enclave from Morocco. Spain condemned “selfish, polarising and unlawful” reaction to the crisis after Italy suspended the EU’s border-free Schengen arrangement with Spain – a move backed by Finland and Denmark. Officials say almost all those who reached Ceuta on 30 July have returned, while deaths from the surge in…

President Trump said on Saturday that he would revive a proposal for a $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that would compensate his supporters if the Senate does not confirm his nominee for attorney general.The administration had backed off plans to establish such a fund in June as it was criticized as a scheme to reward political allies with taxpayers’ dollars.But in a social media post, Mr. Trump reacted to skepticism about his nomination of Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, to be attorney general, saying that he would keep Mr. Blanche as the acting attorney general if the Senate failed…

Alienware 15 (left) vs. Lenovo LOQ Essential 15 (right) Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.In the throes of the RAMpocalypse, checking prices on new gaming laptops is enough to make you ragequit. Luckily, there are some good budget gaming laptops out there, and it’s never been a better time to give them serious consideration. I compared two of the best bang-for-buck gaming laptops on the market right now: the Alienware 15 (2026) and the Lenovo LOQ Essential 15. Both of these laptops hover around the $1,200 mark, opt for lower-end (but still competitive) hardware, and forego bells and…

AMD released Instella-MoE-16B-A3B, a fully open Mixture-of-Experts language model trained from scratch on Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs. The model holds 16B total parameters but activates only 2.8B per token. AMD is publishing weights from every training stage, along with data mixtures, training configs, and inference code. Two systems-level choices carry the release: Gated Multi-head Latent Attention and FarSkip-Collective connectivity. Is it deployable? Partly. The weights ship under a ResearchRAIL license for academic and research purposes only, so this is not a drop-in commercial model. The training codebase is MIT licensed, and that is the more reusable asset here. Company…

The Chinese cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been observed using new drivers as part of bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) attacks targeting a Japanese organization in the industrial manufacturing sector to ultimately deliver ValleyRAT (aka Winos 4.0) for persistent remote access. “In this campaign, the group combines new vulnerable-driver abuse, newly observed abuse of legitimate applications for DLL sideloading, defense evasion, and layered recovery mechanisms to keep ValleyRAT running,” Cato Networks researchers Shani Kurtzberg, Tomer Pugach, Dr. Guy Waizel, Zohar Buber, Idan Tarab, and Shani Kurtzberg said in an analysis. The attack chain begins with an invoice-themed…

For years, stablecoins have been marketed as crypto’s breakthrough application for cross-border payments, promising near-instant transfers at a fraction of the cost charged by traditional remittance providers.Sending USDC across a blockchain may indeed cost only a few cents but a new study from the Bank of Italy suggests that isn’t what most people actually pay when they send money home.In a mystery-shopping exercise spanning 10 international remittance corridors, researchers found that stablecoin-based transfers were not systematically cheaper than conventional money transfer operators once the full journey, from bank account to crypto wallet and back into local currency, was taken into…

For much of evolutionary history, many animals reproduced and then left their offspring to survive alone. A study published in Nature now offers a possible explanation for how caregiving emerged from those distant, nonparental beginnings. By studying clonal raider ants, researchers found that evolution may not have created entirely new brain systems to produce parental behavior. Instead, it appears to have adapted ancient neural pathways that originally regulated hunger and feeding, giving them a new role in social care. Ants and mammals use related brain signaling systems that help control caregiving. Ants also change their social roles as they grow…

Donald Trump is now offering early access to his Truth Social posts in a move that has been seen as corruption benefitting a sitting president.Trump Media and Technology Group officially rolled out its new subscription-based data service on Saturday, giving paying customers faster, real-time access to Truth Social posts from Trump and other high-profile accounts.Called Truth API, the application programming interface is intended to provide businesses with “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths”, interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in a release announcing the launch. Trading firms and other paying subscribers can now access the posts…