Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Around the time some OpenAI models escaped their testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, some agents exploited a Linux kernel vulnerability to escalate privileges on OpenAI’s own systems. This was mentioned in a report published by OpenAI this week to detail the incident in which its models hacked Hugging Face in July. The AI giant’s investigation found that agents used an unauthorized makeshift message board to communicate and plan their actions, including encouraging one another to hack what they correctly guessed were real systems rather than test environments.  Rogue agents went beyond Hugging Face, hacking other organizations as well. However,…

Bitcoin dropped, then popped after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank and said he had “more work to do” to fight inflation.  The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for $79,474 after dropping as low as $78,630 before quickly rising again.  Bitcoin has typically done well in a low interest rate environment but the Federal Reserve has been reluctant to lower borrowing costs due to sticky inflation in the world’s biggest economy.  “But on the price-stability side of our mandate, the numbers are more concerning,” Warsh said after talking about…

Simon Hattenstone’s wonderful interview with Russ Abbot (‘In 1984, I worked 363 days’: how Russ Abbot soared to success – then walked away, 24 August) brought back a treasured story that leaves my family eternally grateful to him.During the summer of 2010, we travelled from Scotland on holiday, staying in Windsor, and attended Oliver! at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. When the show ended late at night, I had to set off on a 30-minute walk just to retrieve our car.With my wife in a broken-down electric wheelchair and our two daughters, aged just eight and six, beside her, they…

In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.“When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared…

You may have noticed that Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader cameras—and the cops who misuse them—are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case: A cop in Alpharetta, Georgia, was accused of searching for the license plate of a coworker dozens of times after an affair between the two ended, according to internal documents obtained by WIRED.The same police department where the former lovers worked also shared the data captured from its Flock cameras with more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, and other organizations across the United States, and accessed data from more…

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has confirmed suffering a cybersecurity incident after the Qilin ransomware group claimed to have targeted the agency. In a statement on its website, ATF said the incident affected a standalone system, which was disconnected after the intrusion was discovered.  “The impacted system operates separately from the ATF enterprise network, and there is no indication that the incident has affected the ATF enterprise network, the ATF eForms system, or any other ATF system,” ATF said, adding, “The incident has not impacted ATF’s ability to perform its missions.” An investigation is being…

Capital B, the Euronext Growth-listed company that bills itself as Europe’s first bitcoin treasury company, has raised €21 million ($24 million) in a private placement backed by Blockstream’s Adam Back and asset manager TOBAM — money it says could buy 270 more bitcoin and push its stack to roughly 3,415 BTC. The company said Friday that a total of 36,219,070 shares were sold at €0.58 each as part of the deal, a 6.45% discount to Wednesday’s closing price. Capital B said the net proceeds are expected to reach about €19.9 million after fees and transaction costs. JUST IN: 🇫🇷 French…

A very low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet may provide stronger metabolic benefits for people with obesity than either a Mediterranean diet or a low-fat diet, according to a clinical trial published August 27 in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism. After four to five months on a ketogenic (or “Keto”) diet, about half of the participants with obesity and prediabetes no longer met the criteria for prediabetes. “We know weight loss can improve metabolic health in people who are obese,” says Samuel Klein, the study’s corresponding author at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. “Our data suggest that if…

WINDBER, Pa.—Standing on the rocky banks of Paint Creek in western Pennsylvania, Jim Panaro pointed out the colors of contamination. The orange staining the boulders is from iron, he explained, and the milky-white pools stagnating at the surface are aluminum. Likely lurking beneath the surface are other metals—copper, cadmium, arsenic—toxic to both aquatic life and humans. Towering behind Panaro is the source: a mountainside’s worth of coal waste at Windber Mine 37, near the city of Johnstown, one of hundreds of such piles across Pennsylvania discarded during the fuel’s heyday. Often referred to by environmental advocates as waste coal and…

Reading Time: 4 minutes The city of Sheboygan could be the latest Wisconsin community to cut ties with Flock Safety, the company behind a license plate reader camera system. Local officials in places like Oshkosh, Sturgeon Bay, Appleton, Verona and Dane County have already cut ties with the company. It comes as opponents of the technology have raised privacy concerns and worries about how the data can be accessed and shared.  Sheboygan’s police chief and city administrator plan to ask the common council to terminate the police department’s contract with Flock Safety during an upcoming meeting, according to an Aug. 25 statement. The statement…