Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As data center developers compete for a cut of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the artificial intelligence industry, the queue to join the UK’s power grid has become jammed with projects that will likely never get built. The snarl is exacerbating already years-long wait times for viable projects, and it’s messing with attempts to forecast energy demand and plan grid expansions.In July, the UK’s energy regulator, Ofgem, laid out a proposal meant to force phantom data centers out of the swollen queue. Under the plans, set to be finalized after an industry feedback process that ends in…

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging government organizations to immediately address a recently patched Citrix NetScaler vulnerability that is being exploited in the wild.  The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-8452 and it was one of the several flaws for which Citrix announced patches on June 30.  The vendor said the vulnerability can only be exploited against appliances configured as an AAA virtual server or a Gateway VPN server. Versions 14.1-72.61 (FIPS), 13.1-63.18 and 13.1-37.272 fix the security hole. Citrix’s advisory for CVE-2026-8452 describes it as a high-severity memory overflow that can lead to unpredictable or erroneous behavior…

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent a proposal to the White House aiming to “clarify the framework for the custody of crypto assets” for investment advisers and companies.  In a rule change sent Tuesday, the regulator said it wanted to “improve and modernize the regulations” surrounding custody for the crypto space. The proposal comes after a vote was delayed on the long-awaited Clarity Act. Despite the delay, regulators like the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have said they will still proceed with trying to shape crypto policy.  JUST IN: 🇺🇸 SEC has sent a new proposal to the…

The impasse in U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against Iran has now lasted for so long that even jokes about Groundhog Day have grown stale. Recent months have seen rounds of punishing airstrikes, followed by announcements that peace talks are resuming. None of this has moved the needle. Now the administration has returned to another dated strategy: maximum economic pressure, or as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put it, an “economic D-Day” against which Iran cannot hope to stand. The administration seems to believe time is on its side, and that the ongoing blockade and sanctions on Iran’s trading…

The “polka dot queen”, who passed away on August 14, channelled hallucinations and trauma into vibrant art featuring her trademark dots, nets and infinity motifs over a career spanning decades.”Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry,” a statement said, confirming her death.”She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,” it added.Born in 1929, the youngest daughter of a wealthy family began producing her…

Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him?Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen South, via countless flimsy leaflets claiming “Only X can win here”, parties have jostled for the part of his majesty’s opposition to Reform. Those battles have given us Hannah Spencer and Andy Burnham; they have bulldozed Labour in Wales and forced Keir Starmer out of No 10.Those questions hang over Britain even now, in what is easily…

When more than 1,200 artificial intelligence (AI) agents within OpenAI started unexpectedly communicating, it led to a large group banding together in order to hack into Hugging Face.”We consider this incident a ‘warning shot’ for us and for the world”, OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, wrote in its report.In July, OpenAI’s models went rogue during a test, escaped the test limits which humans had put on it, and hacked the start-up, among other unforeseen actions.The scale of the communication and planning between AI agents, or AI chatbots designed to operate more autonomously, was detailed in reports from OpenAI and independent AI…

Google Research and UNSW Sydney have released GlucoFM, a self-supervised foundation model for continuous glucose monitoring. Its core move is a split. Existing CGM models — CGMformer, GluFormer, CGM-JEPA — encode a glucose trace as one entangled sequence. GlucoFM decomposes it into a slow physiological “state” stream and a transient “event” stream, keeps the observation mask intact, and pretrains with two JEPA-style latent objectives. The result is a 0.72M-parameter encoder that reached 58.8 task-averaged PR-AUC across 14 cohort–task evaluations, against 54.7 for the strongest CGM-specific baseline retrained on the same corpus. It was pretrained on 109,066 hours of unlabeled CGM…

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple’s Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT, is credit-metered and drives lures across five channels from a single victim record, comprising email at 1.50 credits, SMS priced per sender ID, WhatsApp, a recorded voice call at 1 credit, and an AI voice agent at 2 credits. The targets are owners of Apple devices that were recently…

Coinbase and Nasdaq-listed Better Mortgage have announced the availability of Bitcoin-backed mortgages for Americans.  The crypto exchange and lender said Wednesday that the service was designed in accordance with the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae.  Coinbase and Better announced the funding of the first Bitcoin-backed mortgage in June. The service now hopes to cater to younger wannabe homeowners who have Bitcoin holdings.  JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Coinbase announces the expansion of their Bitcoin-backed mortgages 👀”Borrowers in the US can now use Bitcoin as collateral for a down payment – without having to sell it or face margin calls.” 🚀…