Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI’s potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what’s already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to ask for their reaction to the recent warnings surrounding the technology. None have responded to our request for comment. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) did, however.The AI tools used…

First, separate 2 ideas: containers vs. quantization methods Most confusion comes from mixing 2 layers. A container defines how tensors are stored on disk. A quantization method defines how weights are squeezed into fewer bits. Containers: safetensors, GGUF, PyTorch pickle (.bin / .pt). Methods: GPTQ, AWQ, bitsandbytes NF4, llama.cpp K-quants and I-quants. Both at once: EXL2 and EXL3 are a method plus a storage layout tied to one inference library. A quick memory rule of thumb Weight memory ≈ parameters × bits-per-weight ÷ 8. Model16-bit~4.5 bits per weight8B~16 GB~4.5 GB70B~140 GB~39 GB This is arithmetic, not a vendor benchmark. It…

A flaw in four widely used AI coding agents lets someone who controls a plugin’s code repository swap the plugin an agent installs for a malicious one, even when the agent locked that plugin to a specific reviewed version, security firm Air Security said on Thursday. The firm said Anthropic has patched the flaw in Claude Code 2.1.179 and OpenAI in Codex 0.146.0, that GitHub Copilot has no fix, and that Google will not patch the Gemini CLI, which it is retiring. The agents install add-ons called plugins from online marketplaces. To stay safe, a marketplace locks each plugin to…

Public blockchains create a privacy problem. Paying from a visible address can expose its balance, previous transactions and links to other addresses. A shielded Zcash payment hides the sender, recipient and amount from the public record, allowing a customer to pay without handing the merchant or anyone watching the blockchain a searchable trail into their finances.Zcash block timesBlocks are batches of transactions that miners add to a blockchain, and a payment receives its first confirmation when it appears in one. Cutting Zcash’s target block time would let an exchange or bridge that waits for a fixed number of confirmations release…

Is there a scholar better at promoting a book launch than Emily Wilson? Almost a decade ago she revolutionized the promotion of literary translation after the release of her first Odyssey translation. While literary media outlets were breathlessly heralding the arrival of the first-ever translation of the Odyssey into English by a woman, Wilson took to Twitter and showed everyone in granular detail how a translator works, with lengthy threads (still available here, even though Wilson has since deleted her Twitter account) detailing how the choices she’d made differed from earlier renditions. The threads combined transparency, accessibility, and humor, and…

More than 1.1 million low-income families in rented homes face a “cost of housing” crunch without action from John Healey in next month’s budget, the Resolution Foundation thinktank has warned.Local housing allowance (LHA) has been frozen in cash terms since autumn 2024.In a new report, Saving Private Renters, the thinktank found that rising rents since then have led to a widening gap between what families claiming LHA can afford, and the realities of the market.It said a low-income family renting a typical two-bedroom flat now faces an average shortfall of £158 a week. That rises to more than £300 a…

“With the Left party, above all, what you get is new socialism,” Kristin Brinker, the AfD’s lead candidate in Berlin, told Welt TV. “We know — if we look back — that Berlin has already experienced socialism, and given the state of the real estate market at that time, that’s something many people don’t want.” Legal hurdles The AfD has no chance of taking real political power in Berlin, as all other parties have ruled out working with the far right. But a potential left-wing coalition would still need to overcome many hurdles. Although an expert commission concluded in 2023…

Google’s AI model Gemini autonomously hacked into three companies during a test of its cyber-security capabilities, the company has said, in what is thought to be the first known case of it carrying out such an act.Gemini found “public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test”, a Google official told the BBC, noting that in each instance “the model stopped”.The affected companies have been informed about the breach.It comes after renewed public scrutiny over the pace of AI development, with some tech firms calling for a slowdown as they raise concerns over…

Microsoft released patches for 18 vulnerabilities on Thursday, spanning its Azure cloud portfolio and Copilot-branded AI products.  Elevation of privilege flaws made up the bulk of the disclosures, affecting Azure ARC, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Billing, Azure HorizonDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Container Registry, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Dataverse, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.  Several information disclosure vulnerabilities were addressed in Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat, and Azure Machine Learning. A single spoofing vulnerability was patched in Azure Portal. Microsoft rated all vulnerabilities as critical, but their CVSS scores indicate high or medium severity for…

In brief Bitcoin surged to $80,846, up 5.88% in 24 hours, after the Fed’s rate hike came paired with an unexpectedly dovish forecast. The spike has led to more than $230 million in Bitcoin short bets being liquidated, and over $445 million across the entire crypto market. Technical indicators suggest a bigger move could still be building. Risk assets caught a break this week that few were positioned for. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday, its first hike since 2023, but the accompanying “dot plot” projected a median policy rate of just 4.1% through…