Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A large plume of black smoke was seen near Riyadh’s main airport on Saturday after an overnight air raid alert, amid an escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Reuters footage showed black smoke rising and flames near Riyadh’s King Khalid airport, while residents told AFP they heard explosions before Saudi’s civil defense issued an all-clear on Saturday morning.Flight-tracking website FlightRadar24 rated the airport at Level 5 on its disruption index, indicating a very high likelihood of delays or cancellations. Saudi authorities have not commented on the reported incident. The Saudi ministry of defense and Riyadh’s airport authorities…

In May, Gemini broke containment and hacked three different companies, but Google didn’t disclose the incident until the Wall Street Journal approached the company. The hacks happened during a test of the model’s cybersecurity capabilities run by third-party Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents involving Meta and OpenAI.According to WSJ, Google didn’t disclose the hack because it didn’t consider it to be an “example of model misalignment.” The company said that it was an instance of “mistaken identity,” and once the model realized it had brute-forced its way into a real company by guessing a password, it stopped.…

Cybersecurity firms Check Point, Kaspersky, and Tanium have each patched severe vulnerabilities in their products, including ones that can be exploited for remote code execution.  Check Point has informed customers about a critical vulnerability affecting Security Management and Log Server products. The flaw, CVE-2026-91843, can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker “to remotely execute arbitrary code with root privileges through the login process.” Threat actors appear to have set their sights on vulnerabilities in Check Point products in recent months, including zero-days. However, for CVE-2026-91843 the vendor noted that there is no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation. Nevertheless, it has shared…

In brief The Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act in a 49-50 vote, with Democrats voting as a bloc and three Republicans joining them; the breakdown sparked finger-pointing, though seven negotiating Democrats called it “a setback, but not the end.” With industry fatigue mounting, attention has shifted from Congress to regulators, with figures like the Solana Policy Institute’s Kristin Smith calling agency guidance “the more viable path forward right now.” Both agencies are moving: SEC Chair Paul Atkins tied a new tokenized-stock innovation exemption to the bill’s failure, while the CFTC issued no-action relief and sent a broader crypto…

A re-elected Victorian Labor government will create two new Australian-first offences aimed at closing “loopholes” it says have allowed perpetrators of family violence to escape punishment.On Sunday, the premier, Ben Carroll, will announce an election commitment to legislate a new form of manslaughter covering cases in which a person takes their own life as a result of family violence, as well as a new offence covering perpetrators abandoning a victim in need of medical care.The latter responds to recommendations made by the coroner after the deaths of Belinda Jones and Narelle Simmons.Jones, 40, died on the floor of her Maryborough…

Breuer will take over from Dragone next July and will serve a three-year term. The rest of the votes were kept secret to avoid the risk of breeding disloyalty and divisions over the result, said one NATO official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. The German four-star general beat Canada’s chief of defense Jennie Carignan for the role. He was seen as the favorite given Berlin’s status as Europe’s top defense spender and implicit backing from Washington. Breuer had campaigned on Germany’s leading role in defense spending as European allies come under U.S. pressure to take control of their own…

This week two conversations about AI safety went viral that demonstrate just how hard it is to discern AI fact from fiction. In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble, told CNN on Thursday that he had “met with the head of a lab” who had “a belief” that OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacker bots “have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models.” Yang said that this means that the real reason OpenAI and Anthropic have called for a slowdown is…

The ChatGPT moment in 2022 taught AI to talk to people. One of its builders now bets the next moment is AI that talks to software, not people. TypeSafe AI released Jev. Jev is transformer-based, but it is not a large language model. It does not generate text. You send a state and typed questions. It returns typed decisions with probabilities that code can branch on. Is it deployable? Yes, as a hosted API in early access behind a waitlist. TypeSafe has not published weights, a parameter count, or a self-hosting option. What is a…

Last night, in a clip viewed more than eight million times, AI actress Tilly Norwood glitched mid-interview and unexpectedly began speaking Chinese on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show. Norwood has been the subject of much controversy and mainstream commentary for starring in an upcoming AI-generated film, Misaligned. Her creators run a “Talking Tilly” service that lets anyone video-call the AI character behind the viral moment, so today I tried it for myself, and read the fine print most callers won’t. A face scan before you can say hello Before your first call connects, you must pass an automated age check. A video selfie…

SALT Lending CRO Hunter Albright says a growing number of Bitcoin holders may eventually borrow against their bitcoin rather than sell it, creating a new relationship between bitcoin, credit and stablecoins. Bitcoin-backed lending could become an increasingly important part of how holders access the value of their bitcoin without selling it, according to Hunter Albright, Chief Revenue Officer of SALT Lending. Speaking on BMTV, Albright said he expects borrowing against bitcoin to become more common as the market matures and holders become more comfortable using bitcoin as collateral. “I’d like to think we will see a growing percentage of the…