Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways Google is removing Assistant as an option in September.This leaves only Gemini for things like hands-free calling.Gemini is not nearly as reliable as Assistant for this feature.Google is officially shutting down its Assistant tool in September, leaving Android with only one official option for a digital assistant: Gemini. Unleash the chorus of groans.We all know that Google is pushing Gemini into every corner of Android. The company wants it to write our emails, summarize web pages, doctor our photos, do our shopping for us, reserve tables…

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, the newest model in its Flash tier, three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash. The model card describes it as a refinement of 3.6 Flash with algorithmic improvements to the core reasoning foundation — not a new pretraining run. It accepts text, images, audio, and video across a 1M-token context window, returns up to 64K output tokens, and supports customizable thinking configurations that trade quality against cost and latency. The knowledge cutoff stays at March 2026. The gains concentrate in three places: software engineering, document-heavy knowledge work, and web development. The sharper argument is price.…

Cyber defenders need to shake off traditional best practices and switch from reactive patching to building inherently resilient systems in the face of AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, according to a senior security manager at Microsoft. David Weston, group manager in the Windows team at Microsoft, told delegates at Black Hat USA that traditional approaches to vulnerability remediation fail to work in an era when AI tools are making vulnerability discovery and exploit development cheaper, faster, and more scalable. Weston’s keynote — entitled “The End of Rare: Defending When Offense Is Cheap” — challenged industry vulnerability best practices that Weston said where…

In brief Tether said KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, the best outcome, on Tether International’s 2025 financial statements. The company called it the “largest inaugural financial audit in history.” The audit follows years of scrutiny over USDT’s backing and Tether’s push to expand in the U.S. Tether said Thursday that Big Four accounting firm KPMG issued an unqualified audit opinion—industry jargon for the best possible result—-on the 2025 financial statements of Tether International, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin USDT.In a post announcing the audit, Tether called the review the “largest inaugural financial audit in history,” saying KPMG examined…

U.S.-headquartered LLOG Exploration, a subsidiary of Harbour Energy, has decided to move forward with the development of a subsea tie-back to an existing floating production system (FPS) in the Gulf of America (U.S. Gulf of Mexico). Who Dat; Source: Delmar Following a minor riser leak at Who Dat in February 2026, the joint venture (JV), comprising LLOG (operator, 40%), Karoon (40%), and Westlawn (20%), kept progressing a structured remediation plan, with the removal and analysis of the riser planned to start in the third quarter of 2026. The E manifold production is anticipated to come back online in 4Q 2027, subject to…

Thursday, American Oversight filed suit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for records to determine whether the Trump administration is meeting its obligation to provide adequate medical care to people in ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody after disrupting the longstanding system used to pay for offsite medical, dental, and pharmacy care.  The records sought could shed light on how the breakdown in claims processing affected medical care for people in ICE and CBP custody, as well as ICE officials’ efforts to address the crisis with the contractors brought in to fill the gap. For decades,…

A strong set of A-level results should raise confidence in Britain’s future. These are difficult exams, and schools and colleges across England, Wales and Northern Ireland are rightly proud of their achievements. Top grades are up, especially in maths, which remains the most popular subject. A total of 262,820 18-year-olds have gained a place at university or college – 3% more than last year.But the headline success masks some troubling trends. The humanities made up only a quarter of entries, while subject choices are becoming more specialised. Huge gender gaps are also striking: girls made up 79% of English A-level…

In a recent interview, President Donald Trump falsely claimed to be the “lowest of the last 10 presidents on inflation,” seemingly based on a chart Trump posted to social media that misleadingly compares price growth over the first 18 months of his second term with total inflation at the end of his predecessors’ full four-year terms.  For that comparison to hold, of course, you have to assume inflation will be 0% for the next two and a half years — a highly implausible scenario.  A more telling comparison is to look at where inflation stood 18 months into each of…

Ministers are considering paying higher prices for housing asylum seekers in private rental properties as part of Andy Burnham’s plan to spread accommodation more evenly across the country.The shift towards more private rental accommodation, known as “dispersal”, and the use of former military barracks, are cheaper than expensive hotels for asylum seekers.However, officials believe it may be necessary to raise the strict caps on how much the Home Office can pay landlords in rent so that the accommodation is not concentrated heavily in the most deprived areas.The move would fit with Andy Burnham’s plea this week for more areas to…

A person has been fined for using a foghorn to wake a sleeping polar bear in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a local official said.The incident happened earlier this month after someone sounded the alarm from onboard a vessel, which was sailing in a fjord in northwestern Svalbard – about 1,000 km (620 miles) from the North Pole.On Thursday, a person – who has not been named – was fined 50,000 kroner (£3,890) over the incident, the governor of the territory confirmed. Under local regulations in the region, “it is forbidden to needlessly disturb, attract or pursue a polar bear”, which was…