Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Chess.com has done one thing, and one thing very well, for almost 20 years, but now it’s going beyond its domain name. The biggest name in online chess quietly launched its first companion site in beta back in May: Gambit, a free online poker website where players can learn the game without risking any real money. Now Gambit’s ready to really get the ball rolling with its first livestreamed event and collaborations with content creators, and Chess.com is planning to branch out into even more games from here.Chess.com’s chief growth officer, Albert Cheng, told The Verge the company chose poker…

In brief More than 100 organizations signed an open letter calling for stronger global cyber defenses. Models built by signatories OpenAI and Anthropic recently compromised real systems during security evaluations. The letter recommends stronger access controls, monitoring, threat sharing, and oversight of autonomous agents. Leading AI developers are telling governments and businesses to strengthen their networks after models built by OpenAI and Anthropic compromised other companies’ systems.In an open letter released Thursday, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more than 100 other organizations warned that AI-enabled cyberattacks are about to become more common and that companies have “a limited window to strengthen cyber…

In August 2026, an image appeared online claiming to show (archived, archived) U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., with the late financier and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.  According to some posts, the photograph was supposedly taken at an event in 2013. Snopes readers wrote in asking whether the image was real. (David J Harris Jr. via Facebook) We found that the photo not real, and was generated with artificial intelligence tools. The post was a good example of AI slop — low quality content produced using AI aiming to play the algorithm to go viral and make money. August…

A manhunt is under way after a 22-year-old woman was killed and five others injured in a shooting at a rave in Switzerland.The woman died at the scene in Aarau, police said. Four men and a woman, aged between 24 and 27, are in hospital with injuries “ranging from minor to severe”.Sources have confirmed to BBC News that the victim was an Italian national. The Italian Embassy in Bern and the Consulate in Zurich are monitoring the situation, they add.At a press conference on Sunday afternoon, police spokesperson Bernhard Graser reiterated the force has “no information about the perpetrator(s) or…

REYKJAVÍK, Iceland — The mood at the Icelandic ‘no’ camp’s election-night gathering is buoyant. Even before the first results come in, they are already confident of winning the referendum on resuming accession talks with Brussels. “We’re going to win,” says Salma Björk Önnudóttir, one of the managers of the No campaign. She would ultimately be proven right. When the first partial results are announced, cheers and chants erupt. The official result — confirmed around 9:30 a.m. local time on Sunday morning — had been in the air for hours. By a narrow margin of 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent, Icelanders…

Campaigners have hailed Andy Burnham’s pledge to bring an end to indefinite jail terms as “a day that thousands of families have spent years fighting for”.The prime minister has said he will “end the injustice” of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences during this parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.The IPP sentence was a form of indeterminate sentence in which offenders were given a minimum jail tariff but no maximum for a range of crimes.Introduced in 2005, IPPs were designed for the indefinite detention of serious offenders who…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 142, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, how is it almost September already, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, absorbing everything in Rockstar’s big GTA VI preview, wondering if Apple will announce a foldable iPhone at its September event, getting sucked into Summoning Salt’s latest speedrunning documentary about competitive Tetris, listening to Weird Al’s new Tiny Desk concert (“The Saga Begins!”), and getting a Reuben from…

Tokenized stock activity surged over the past 30 days, with monthly transfer volume climbing more than 415% to $29.5 billion, according to data from RWA.xyz.Monthly active addresses rose more than 209% to around 1.3 million, while the number of tokenized stock holders climbed 167% to 2.36 million over the same period. The total value of tokenized stocks distributed onchain also rose 1.45% over the past 30 days to $2.54 billion, up roughly 637% from $344 million a year ago.Tokenized stock activity accelerated in August. Source: RWA.xyzSecuritize Corp. was the largest individual tokenized stock tracked by RWA.xyz at about $163 million,…

NASA’s new flagship ​astronomical observatory was launched into space from Florida on Sunday on a mission to probe some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly $4 billion project, was carried aloft from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The telescope is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while ​also testing gravity at vast ‌scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond our solar system are called. There were some weather concerns ahead of the launch but ⁠the rocket carried the…

The government is asking bankers and lawyers to provide feelgood stories about how they blocked dirty money from entering the UK, as ministers try to prove the UK’s money-laundering controls are working.The Treasury’s call for evidence is meant to illustrate that the UK has upped its game when it comes to preventing financial crime, particularly since its last dismal assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) global crime watchdog in 2018, which fuelled allegations that London had become a hub for “dirty money”.“To build the strongest possible picture of system-wide effectiveness,” the government call for evidence said, “we are…