Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Perplexity has released pplx, an official command line client for its Search API. The tool returns grounded search results and extracted page text, all as JSON. According to its docs, it targets humans and coding agents equally. It is not a chat client. There is no conversational mode, no model selection and no synthesized answer. Two surfaces, one output contract The tool exposes exactly two working surfaces. pplx search web runs a live web search. pplx content fetch pulls a URL and returns cleaned page text. The contract around them is the interesting part. Per the official pplx-cli Agent Skill,…

Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies announced on Monday the launch of the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents.  The effort builds on existing work from the Linux Foundation’s recently launched Akrites initiative and the OpenSSF community. Inaugural partners of the Open Secure AI Alliance also include Adobe, Cadence, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudera, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, DoorDash, Elastic, HPE, Hugging Face, IBM, LangChain, Microsoft, Naver, NetApp, Nous Research, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red…

Tether’s gold-backed token XAUt has received Shariah certification from Amanah Advisors, a move that could expand access to the token among Islamic financial institutions and investors seeking Shariah-compliant exposure to physical gold.The certification found XAUt’s structure complies with key Islamic finance principles, including full backing by physical gold, the absence of interest and leverage, and transparent reserves. Each XAUt token represents one troy ounce of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults, according to Tether.The designation gives Tether a clearer pathway to market XAUt to Islamic financial institutions and investors that require Shariah-compliant investment products. Tether said it expects the certification…

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured an “orphan” black hole lighting up as it devoured a star on the outskirts of a faraway galaxy. These phenomena are rare to begin with, and none had ever before been seen so far outside of a galaxy’s core. “We were looking for these star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from the galactic cores where they usually reside,” said Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “With this discovery, which is one…

UK-based upstream oil & gas player Serica Energy has agreed to acquire compatriot Pharos Energy for £145.7 million (more than €170 million), with Pharos to withdraw its recommendation for an offer from Israeli Ratio Petroleum. The acquisition is said to be consistent with Serica Energy’s long-standing strategic objective to increase its scale and diversification by adding overseas operations with a focus on regions which benefit from a supportive regional environment for upstream investment and increasing energy demand as well as room for further growth. The deal would expand the company’s operations into Vietnam and Egypt, increasing its pro forma 2P…

For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself. The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed. Doing so would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Starting decades ago, thousands of…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to use technology to make India’s college exams airtight, but India’s student protesters are now more worried about arrests and other steps to suppress their movement.The site in New Delhi where thousands of young protesters braved security forces’ swinging batons and firing tear-gas shells — and who celebrated in triumph on Saturday night — had fallen silent. Gone were the barricades and scrawled slogans, leaving only a heavy police presence on the blocks that shook Mr. Modi like no other challenge in the past 12 years that he has been in power.To some who…

Iran reacted with fury to the assault which it said had killed one sailor and injured several others. The foreign ministry said Iran had “never intervened in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the attack represented “a blatant UN Charter violation done at Israel’s behest to drag Europe into its war.”The incident “CANNOT GO UNANSWERED,” he wrote on X.In his own statement on Monday, Sybiha included Araghchi’s post, with the words “Iranian lies” posted across it.He also accused Iran of trying to shift attention away from Russia’s attacks on ships carrying grain from Ukrainian ports,…

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysTrade in old electronics for a Costco gift card.No Costco membership required to participate.Phobio handles shipping and pricing for your devices.Have some old electronics around the house? You might be able to turn those into free groceries.Big-box wholesaler Costco offers an electronics trade-in program where you can send your old devices and get a store gift card in return. The best part is that you don’t even have to be a Costco member to participate.Also: One of these 13 gadgets could be the hero your…

A Cl0p ransomware affiliate has been observed exploiting a critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in PTC’s product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms Windchill and FlexPLM. Tracked as CVE-2026-12569 (CVSS score of 9.3), the security defect is described as a deserialization of untrusted data issue that can be exploited without authentication. Patched on June 17, the bug was flagged as exploited in the wild the next day, when PTC published indicators of compromise (IoCs). It was added to CISA’s KEV catalog at the end of June. Fresh warnings from ReliaQuest and Ransom-ISAC (in collaboration with eCrime.ch and Defused) show that the…