Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

To most of the world, he was and will always be the “Butcher of Bosnia”, a grim epithet but one that still fails to fully convey the evil and horror inflicted on its people by Gen Ratko Mladić, who died in prison on Thursday.As commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Mladić was responsible for the killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women and children during the savage breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was most notoriously the architect of ethnic cleansing and the genocide at Srebrenica in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered.Today, 31…

Training AI models with other AI models has become a very popular goal for neolabs — and now, a researcher in Anthropic’s fellows program has given us an early look at what it might look like in practice. On Friday, Anthropic published a new paper titled “Automated Researchers Can Reliably Mitigate Alignment Failures,” detailing how AI systems could reliably improve a model’s performance on a set of alignment benchmarks. When given 10 benchmarks for specific misaligned behaviors, the automated systems were able to improve performance on every single one without degrading overall performance. Led by Anthropic fellow Chen Yueh-Han, the…

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a critical security flaw impacting ownCloud to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog following reports that a Chinese-speaking threat actor weaponized the vulnerability to target a nuclear research body in the Philippines. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-49105 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of WebDAV API authentication bypass that could allow an attacker to access, modify or delete any file without authentication if the username of the victim is known and the victim has no signing-key configured, which is the default configuration. Disclosed by ownCloud in November 2023, the…

Southern mountain caribou are a type of caribou found in mature forests of western Canada, where they subsist on lichen as a winter food.Habitat loss — primarily driven by logging — has transformed their mature forest habitat, upsetting the predator-prey balance and leading to caribou declines.In the past 20 years, 15 of 40 southern mountain caribou herds in British Columbia and Alberta have winked out, including a transboundary herd that once ranged into the U.S. states of Idaho and Washington.In June, the Syilx Okanagan Nation asked the Canadian government to issue an emergency order to protect caribou, with a…

British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and is awaiting deportation.Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and onetime political aide to rapper Kanye West, appears to be held in Louisiana, according to ICE’s inmate registry. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said he “was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing”, and will remain in custody pending deportation.The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a…

I am nothing if not a huge movie buff. I watch way too many of them, and I’m always on the hunt for a new format in which to experience them. So when XREAL, the smart glasses company, sent me an a01 — one of its newer models, which it released in May of this year — I was eager to give them a spin as the newest vector by which to satisfy my media fanaticism. The a01 isn’t a particularly sophisticated smart glasses model. Unlike more software-heavy AR glasses like, say, the Meta Orion or Snap’s Specs, it’s basically…

OPINIONThere are three statements that sum up the frustrating reality for defenders responding to a cyberattack on operational technology (OT) systems: The attack data is not there. There is no trail to follow. There is no history to sort through.While these dynamics will always be true for OT, defenders are getting help from cyber deception as it matures beyond honeypots to a more sophisticated, proactive cyber-defense tool.To illustrate the problem, let’s go back in time. Nearly 12 years ago, portions of Ukraine’s electric grid went dark. It was an IT-to-OT attack, one that originates in the IT portion of the…

In brief Meta is testing robots that can swap cables, restart servers, and inspect equipment. Some workers fear the machines will reduce staffing or shift technical work to lower-paid roles. The robots remain slow and require human assistance. Meta is testing robots to maintain the data centers powering its artificial intelligence systems, including machines that can replace networking cables, restart servers, and inspect equipment.According to a Friday WIRED report, Meta is testing robots from San Francisco-based Watney Robotics, Quebec-based Kinova, and Zurich-based ABB that could reduce labor costs—and potentially staffing—as its AI infrastructure expands.Myriad: How high will Nvidia go? Click…

Seven Indigenous Guarani, including two children and a prominent community leader, were killed Aug. 14 in a crash with a grain cargo trailer that reportedly broke loose from the truck pulling it in central Brazil. All seven were from Kalipety village in the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Territory in São Paulo state. A fisher who witnessed the crash told police that the corn-filled cargo trailer detached from the truck and “violently” struck the passenger car, according to a police report seen by Mongabay. The force of the collision caused both vehicles to catch fire, killing everyone in the car…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Wisconsin’s prison population hit a record high this week, a new milestone for a system that has for decades held thousands more people than it was designed for. According to figures released Friday, the state’s Department of Corrections held 23,854 people in custody. That’s 28 above the record set in 2019 and nearly 6,000 beyond the prisons’ intended capacity. Wisconsin’s prisons have been severely over capacity for at least 20 years, prompting officials to add bunk beds and increase the number of people per cell. The three prisons that house only women are particularly overcrowded. There,…