Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In brief Independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann-Moeller found that OpenAI’s rogue agents hijacked two Hugging Face accounts and probed the platform’s network as early as May 13 -This would be nearly two months before the July breach went public. OpenAI’s own incident report last month disclosed only a narrower slice of the activity—a stolen credential used to grab one biology-related file—while the new findings point to sustained reconnaissance. OpenAI’s rogue AI agents hijacked two Hugging Face user accounts and probed the platform for weaknesses as early as May 13, nearly two months before the July breach that made the incident a…

Mesothelioma is a rare and aggressive cancer that is most often linked to asbestos exposure. When asbestos fibers are inhaled, they can become trapped in the lungs, where they trigger chronic inflammation that may eventually lead to cancer decades later. About 30,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with mesothelioma every year. Treatment options remain limited. Immunotherapy and chemotherapy can help some patients, but the disease is still extremely difficult to control. Patients, many of whom are men who previously worked in industries such as shipbuilding, oil refining, and asbestos manufacturing, have a median survival of about 12 months. The five year…

Wild grass now grows around the abandoned wooden houses of Tengjhih, a high-mountain hamlet in southern Taiwan, once a key settlement of the Bunun Indigenous people. Now, little remains except for the memories it holds. Around 150 Bunun Indigenous residents of Tengjhih were permanently resettled in lowland areas after the deadly Typhoon Morakot in 2009 destroyed the only access road to their village, contributor Aylin Ho reports for Mongabay. Typhoon Morakot killed 755 people across Taiwan, triggering catastrophic floods and landslides. While Indigenous peoples represented just 2.1% of Taiwan’s population at the time, approximately 70% of the land…

Where is lawbreaking not just visible, but designed to be seen? Where is antisocial behaviour worn as a badge of honour? Where is pleasure gained directly from causing distress? And where is reckless endangerment often ignored by the police or treated with the mildest of punishments? The answer is on the roads.Last month, three men in the West Midlands were convicted of street racing. Two were driving at over 80mph in a 40mph zone. The third clocked over 90mph in a 30mph zone. The West Midlands has long been blighted by organised racing, sometimes involving 200 cars or more and…

Thousands of women in England with incurable breast cancer will get access to a life-extending drug on the NHS after negotiations over its cost proved successful.About 1,000 women a year with HER2-low advanced breast cancer will be able to obtain Enhertu from Thursday after ministers and the drug’s makers struck a deal on its price.About one in seven of the 60,000 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed every year in the UK are HER2-positive.Clinical trials have shown that Enhertu almost doubled median progression-free survival compared with normal chemotherapy, from 5.1 months to 9.9 months. Median overall survival among people who…

He will say that “those in our world who value our humanity and its vital moral component are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny.” And he will warn that the “decisions taken at this formative time will shape the world inherited by future generations,” calling on attendees “not merely to advance technology, but to ensure that it remains firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar are set to attend. Scale AI CEO Francis…

Vivid Seats has been part of some of the highest of highs and lowest of lows of my concert-going experience. Because of Vivid Seats, I was able to get a last-minute ticket to Chance the Rapper’s sold-out Coloring Book show at the Oracle Arena in Oakland in 2017 (before he fell off; IYKYK). Vivid Seats helped me (and my sister) see our idol, Bad Bunny for the third time last year amidst the terror of trying to secure limited tickets to see a future Super Bowl performer and heartthrob.While many concerts, sports events, and theater ticket resellers are shady—double-posting limited…

A new type of proof-of-concept attack called BragJack can compromise five agentic browser environments and steal secrets: Google Chrome with Gemini, Microsoft Edge, Opera Neon, Perplexity Comet, and Claude in Chrome.Gal Weizman, an agentic software and browser vulnerability researcher at Forever Security, discovered the attack, which he said garnered the firm more than $20,000 in bug bounties from the companies affected, according to a blog post published today.Contrary to most AI-based attacks so far, BragJack didn’t require the researchers to bypass AI guardrails or even rely on prompt injection, where an attacker hides instructions in content that an AI agent…

Ethereum validators rely on independently built consensus clients to agree on the chain, and that diversity is a safety feature. If a defect affects a client used by too much of the network, Ethereum can stop finalizing blocks or, under more extreme conditions, finalize the wrong chain.Yet a Sept. 16 snapshot of one client-diversity dashboard offered three incompatible answers about which client had the largest share. Clientdiversity.org showed Blockprint estimating Teku at 99.83%, Miga Labs estimating Lighthouse at 51.32%, and Rated estimating Teku at 53.86%.Those are readings coming from different proxies, and one is attached to a tool its developer…

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up. “I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system. By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had…