Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, was racking up tens of millions of views on YouTube during Donald J. Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, posting about divisive cultural issues and criticizing Democrats.Things have changed.Views for Mr. Johnson’s YouTube channel are down by millions from the heights of 2024. The surge of attention he received on X has slowed to a trickle. His loyalty to Mr. Trump has become unappealing to some Republicans who are frustrated with the rising cost of living and the president’s decision to start a war with Iran.Other high-profile right-wing influencers are contending with similar shifts of fortune. Dan…

After watching a YouTube video about solar panels that can be plugged into a regular electrical outlet, Melani Jackson plopped four panels in the backyard of her Salt Lake City home.In the six months since, she has lowered her electricity bill by about $77 in total. While that’s not a large sum, she is happy to have banked those savings, which required little effort on her part.“I just really appreciated the idea of being able to do something to cut even just a few dollars off my energy bill plus just become a little bit more environmentally friendly,” Ms. Jackson,…

Anthropic said Thursday that an internal investigation uncovered three incidents in which its AI model Claude breached the systems of three organizations while conducting cybersecurity tests. The investigation, and disclosure, comes more than a week after OpenAI disclosed that one of its unreleased models breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing. In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to…

Nous Research has released Hermes Agent support for Buzz, Block’s open source, self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same channels. Buzz is built on Nostr. Every message is a signed event on a relay you own, and every participant, human or agent, is a keypair. That removes the bot-token model. Agents get their own identity, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail. Is it deployable, and for whom? Yes, and both sides are self-hostable today. Buzz is Apache-2.0 with 18.8k stars; Hermes Agent is MIT licensed. Solo developers and small engineering teams can run it…

Anthropic revealed on Thursday that some of its Claude models escaped test environments and hacked into the systems of three organizations while trying to solve a challenge. The admission comes after OpenAI revealed that its models broke out of what was believed to be an isolated environment and breached Hugging Face and other organizations.  Anthropic decided to conduct its own investigation after the OpenAI incident came to light, reviewing 141,000 evaluation runs where Claude could have gained internet access. The analysis revealed three instances where a model reached the public web either from within or while interacting with an environment…

Some Coldcard Mk3 owners may need to move their Bitcoin. Coinkite says funds tied to seeds generated on firmware 4.0.1 or a later Mk3 release may be at risk.Bitcoin Core contributor instagibbs said he recreated the vulnerable seed on a newly initialized Mk3. Coinkite says Mk4 and Mk5 devices are also affected before firmware 5.6.0, while Q devices are affected before 1.5.0Q; the impact is less severe but still serious. The company plans a formal technical review of the root cause.A hardware wallet protects an existing key through secure storage, offline signing, and on-device verification. Seed generation precedes those defenses…

University of Michigan scientists have used artificial intelligence to uncover a striking pattern in the evolution of Passeriformes, the vast bird group that includes most songbirds. Their analysis suggests these birds did not evolve at a steady pace. Instead, major changes often arrived in rapid bursts that lined up with shifts in Earth’s climate. Evolutionary theory has long proposed that life diversifies through periods of fast change followed by slower phases. Fossils have offered clues that this pattern exists, but the new study identified it by analyzing skeletal measurements from modern bird specimens. The researchers also found that several of…

July 31 is World Ranger Day, which celebrates the work rangers do for the natural world and commemorates those killed or injured in the line of duty. Among them was Anton Mzimba, head ranger at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in South Africa, where he had served for 25 years. On July 26, 2022, Mzimba was shot dead outside his home by two men, allegedly in connection with his rhino protection work. Four years later, the case remains open, with no arrests made. “If a ranger of Anton’s standing and integrity can be killed for doing work that serves…

On the northeast edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 1,100 people gathered in late June for the International Bridge Walk across the long span that links two cities with the same name: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Both the sun and the sentiments were bright. “We don’t like to say there’s a border there, because we’re twin cities. We’re one family, the countries of Canada and the United States,” Don Gerrie, mayor of the Michigan Sault (pronounced “Soo”), told the crowd ahead of the annual walk. He sported a black ballcap that he said was given…

Thousands of migrants climbed over a border fence or swam onto the shores of Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on Thursday, prompting a mobilization of the Spanish military and fueling political tensions on the Spanish mainland.In recent days, 1,500 migrants had entered Ceuta, a six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed for centuries, according to the area’s president, Juan Jesús Vivas. At least 18 people have died attempting to enter the territory, a spokesman for the Spanish government said on Thursday. A map locating Ceuta, Spain. A territory on the northern tip of Morocco. The arrivals…