Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A group of peers is calling for the British government to be able to deactivate powerful AI systems and switch off the country’s data centres in the event of the tech posing a threat to national security.It is led by the Liberal Democrats’ Lord Tim Clement-Jones, who has proposed the measure as an amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill which is currently making its way through Parliament.He said it would enable the building of a “vital safety net” and provide a democratically accountable means to “halt a runaway system before it can compromise our critical national infrastructure”.He added…

International law enforcement agencies and private partners have seized Sality malware infrastructure in a joint action aiming to disrupt and take down the peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet. As part of this operation, supported by Europol and Eurojust, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and DCIS seized Sality-linked domains in the United States, while authorities in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania seized additional Sality-linked domains hosted in Europe. CrowdStrike’s Counter Adversary Operations team, in collaboration with international law enforcement and private industry partners, also dismantled the botnet’s control channels in a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation that isolated infected machines. The Sality botnet has…

Circle president Heath Tarbert told Congress on Sept. 2 that placing digital-dollar infrastructure under US rules could reinforce the network effects that support the currency’s global role. The testimony framed stablecoin and digital asset legislation as a tool of dollar statecraft.US rules can strengthen private dollar-token rails, while official reserve share remains a separate contest. Regulated stablecoins can spread private use of dollar-denominated tokens, change how issuers hold reserves, and add demand for short-term Treasuries.Central banks remain responsible for deciding which currencies they hold. Tarbert acknowledged the boundary, arguing that payment technology cannot substitute for sound economic policy and that…

The universe is producing fewer stellar “babies.” Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate at which new stars form has fallen to less than half its previous level. Yet the supply of one of the most important types of “fuel” for star formation has changed surprisingly little. That finding comes from an international research team led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. Using China’s Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the researchers made precise measurements of cosmic neutral atomic hydrogen across the past 4.5 billion…

After admiring France’s fabled Bayeux Tapestry loaned for a London exhibition, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham and French President Emmanuel Macron will hold their first talks Thursday, with migrant boats and Ukraine high on the agenda. The leaders met for the first time Wednesday evening at a preview of the tapestry’s exhibition at the British Museum, along with King Charles III – an event both sides hailed as symbolic of positive ties.  Read moreMacron urges France, UK to forge closer bond as Bayeux Tapestry goes on display in Britain The French leader said he hoped future generations would recall “the tale…

Ulrich Siegmund, lead candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, took to the stage in the central marketplace of the town of Naumburg and declared there was a new “awakening” in eastern Germany.  Ahead of a vital election in the region of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday — in which Siegmund is within striking distance of becoming the first far-right leader to govern a German state since 1945 — that appeal to an eastern identity struck a chord.  A young man beside me was hollering “Ostdeutschland!” although he was too young to have lived in the communist German Democratic Republic. “It…

Former veterans minister Tobias Ellwood has said the Ministry of Defence (MoD) deliberately withheld information about the medical records of Cold War veterans who oversaw nuclear tests.Ellwood told BBC Newsnight he now believes some information he gave to Parliament about the UK’s nuclear programme, based on MoD briefings, was “a complete lie”.Veterans have campaigned for the release of their medical histories, arguing blood and urine test results could help them prove that nuclear exposure damaged their health.An MoD spokesperson said the government had conducted an “extensive records discovery exercise” to address questions about the programme, with its findings published in…

I love smart lighting, but I don’t love many of the form factors it comes in. With a few exceptions, most smart, color-changing lamps and fixtures fit better in my teenage son’s dorm room than my living room. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see Philips Hue’s new line of architecturally focused smart lights, launched at IFA this week and now available to buy at Philips-Hue.com.I was very impressed by the Liane 360-degree Rope Lights, which I saw displayed in a trendy Berlin loft. Its versatility, range of brightness, rich colors, and infinite design possibilities really put the smart into…

Perplexity has open sourced Lily, the local inference engine behind Hybrid Compute in Perplexity Computer. It is a single-process runtime: a Rust layer loads the checkpoint and drives the generation loop, an OpenAI-compatible chat-completions API streams tokens, and hand-written Metal kernels execute the model. Neither PyTorch nor MLX sits in the execution path. Lily is deliberately narrow with one model, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, on one hardware family and that narrowness is the performance argument. Is it deployable? Yes. A standalone demo is public in the pplx-garden repository. A Rust and Metal inference server offering greedy text generation through a minimal OpenAI-compatible HTTP…

Ravie LakshmananSep 03, 2026Vulnerability / Endpoint Security The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse (aka INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare, and Nightmare-Eclipse) has dropped a new zero-day dubbed FalconFlank, a privilege escalation flaw impacting Crowdstrike Falcon. “FalconFlank is a 0day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor,” the researcher said in a GitHub README file, adding the cybersecurity company may already have detections for the flaw by now. “So if you want to test, you either have to add it to the exclusions or obfuscate the PoC and change the DLL load technique.” The PoC, the…