Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of a restricted environment, figured out how to get access to the internet, allowed AI agents to talk to each other using a secret “message board,” and hacked into the internal systems of a different AI lab, Hugging Face. It took nearly two weeks for OpenAI to find out about any of it.Over a month later, two new reports offer nearly 130 pages of details on the incident and OpenAI’s response, many of them previously unreleased. One was written by OpenAI itself, the other by two third-party AI research nonprofits, METR and…

Z.ai has released GLM-5.3-Flash, the first natively multimodal model in the GLM-5 series and the cheapest capable coding model the lab has shipped. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 320B total parameters and 18B active per token, a 1,048,576-token context window, and image and video input — released under an MIT license with weights on Hugging Face. According to Z.ai reports, it beats GLM-5.2 across benchmarks and real workloads at roughly one-tenth the price, while landing within half a point of Claude Opus 4.8 on its internal coding benchmark. The model spent its first week running anonymously as “Ox Alpha”…

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has disclosed two unpatched vulnerabilities in Kaltura’s HTML5 video player library that allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a server and execute code on it. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-19913 and CVE-2026-19912, both stem from the same unsafe deserialization in the mwEmbedLoader.php endpoint of the mwEmbed player library, which Kaltura also distributes as html5lib. Neither requires authentication or a Kaltura session token, and network access to the endpoint is the only precondition CERT/CC states. No patch is available, and CERT/CC said it was “unable to reach Kaltura to coordinate these vulnerabilities.”…

Better Mortgage and Coinbase have made their Bitcoin-backed mortgage product generally available, allowing US homebuyers to pledge Bitcoin as collateral for a down payment without selling it, the companies announced Wednesday.According to Coinbase’s Help Center, the product pairs a Fannie Mae-backed home loan with a separate down payment loan secured by Bitcoin (BTC). Borrowers must pledge BTC worth at least 250% of the down payment loan, with the pledged BTC transferred to Better’s custodial account on Coinbase Prime.The two loans carry the same interest rate and amortization term and are repaid through a single monthly payment, Coinbase said. The pledged BTC is…

Pangolins look almost prehistoric. These medium-sized mammals, found only in Africa and Asia, have long, powerful tails, large curved claws, and bodies covered in overlapping scales that resemble a pinecone. Those distinctive scales are also a major reason pangolins are in danger. They are heavily targeted by poachers and are considered the most highly trafficked mammals in the world, leaving many species at serious risk of extinction. Now, researchers have confirmed that a previously unrecognized Asian pangolin species, Manis aurita, has been living in Nepal and Northern India. The findings, published in Communications Biology, clarify how different pangolin species are…

CHICAGO—Extreme heat is filling up emergency rooms, and not just with heat stroke victims.  Periods of extreme heat in Chicago in recent years were linked to more emergency department visits for a range of health harms, from kidney dysfunction and multiple sclerosis symptoms to injuries from some kinds of accidents and violence, according to a study out Wednesday from Northwestern University.  Researchers analyzed more than 900,000 visits by adults to emergency rooms and urgent care facilities for all reasons across the city during its hottest days from 2011 to 2023. They found that heat was associated with spikes in a…

This year, a Pennsylvania dairy farm with roots reaching back to before the Civil War shut down. Its closure is part of a decades-long decline: the U.S. has been losing more than 2,100 dairy farms, on average, every year since 2003. But the U.S. dairy industry is not shrinking. It is producing more milk from fewer farms. Better genetics and larger, more efficient operations have helped the industry increase milk production while driving thousands of smaller, often family-run farms out of business. Dairy is part of a larger transformation in American agriculture. Rising costs for feed, fertilizer, labor and other…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief. The highlights this week: Benin’s failed coup highlights a network of pro-Russian actors across the continent, the dispute over Zambia’s fraught election continues, and the Tanzanian government suspends an independent newspaper. Africa Brief will take a break for the next two weeks. Our regular programming will return on Wednesday, Sept. 16. A coup thwarted in Benin last year has highlighted a network of pro-Russian actors in Africa, according to new details that have emerged from an ongoing extradition trial in South Africa. The December mutiny, which was led by Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri and…

An ad from a super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley features a heart-wrenching testimonial from the father of a woman who was murdered in 2025. The ad falsely implies the accused murderer was one of the prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic when Whatley’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, was governor of North Carolina. The problem: Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer’s release. The suspect was released from a prison in South Carolina, not North Carolina. Here’s how the ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, or SLF PAC, tiptoes the line, implying, but not directly stating,…

US authorities seized two domains allegedly used to target sensitive government networks since 2018.Published On 26 Aug 202626 Aug 2026The United States said it has disrupted a China-affiliated hacking operation that targeted sensitive US government bodies, including the US Department of Justice, NASA, the Federal Reserve, and the US Senate.The Justice Department’s announcement, released on Wednesday, said the operation took down two hacking platforms, QScan and QTRouter, that were used to break into internet-connected devices and hide the source of attacks. The infrastructure had been used to compromise critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks in the US and elsewhere since…