Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Vercel has released Is Agentic, a public tool that scores how readily AI agents can discover, access, understand, and use a website. Scans are run and scored by Ora, an agent-experience research company from era labs. Vercel operates the interface, report pages, storage, and the grouping that produces the displayed score. Is it deployable? Yes — at zero cost. Is Agentic is currently free, with no paid plans, subscription charges, or per-report fees. The public site, read-only API, CLI, and MCP server require no API key or billing account. Enter a URL in the browser, or run the CLI: npx…

Secret Network executed a 1.079 billion-SCRT mint on Aug. 21 as backers of Proposal 365 moved to keep the Cosmos-based layer 1 operating ahead of SCRT Labs’ Sept. 1 support cutoff.Proposal 365 passed and scheduled the v1.26.0-community-continuance upgrade for block 26,790,327. Results from that block record the full mint as a finalize-block upgrade event, with no normal user transaction or mint transaction hash.After the upgrade, the live secret-4 node reported software version 1.26.0 and reached block 26,806,270. Those observations establish that the upgrade ran and block production continued, while the proposal still leaves development, infrastructure and validator participation dependent on…

Roughly 400 years ago, a member of the Indigenous Potano-Timucua tribe shaped a small clay vessel by hand. The pot was compact enough to fit in a palm, with a simple rim, a smooth dull gray surface, and no decoration. Its original purpose is unknown, as is the number of people who may have used it. What archaeologists do know is that the vessel survived for centuries underground before University of Florida students uncovered it earlier this year, still completely intact. “It’s very unique. Typically, we find things that were broken and discarded,” said Gifford Waters, collections manager for historical…

For months in 2026, a rumor circulated that Google had automatically opted in all users to let its artificial intelligence model to scan private communications such as emails and chats. While was true that Google’s AI and generative AI accessed users’ private content, it had been the case for a while. So-called “smart features” across Gmail and the Workspace platform required AI access to users’ private content. Snopes found tutorials posted as early as 2020 to help users disable smart features.  A spokesperson for Google said in an email statement that it was “misleading” to say the company is training…

Chelsea’s story has rarely been one of plain sailing. The Blues first won the English top flight in 1955, and by 1971 had won three FA Cups and the old UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup.Fortunes soon turned, and in 1983, the west Londoners avoided relegation to the English third tier by the skin of their teeth. Within a decade, the good times were rolling again, and a 26-year wait for a trophy ended with their fourth FA Cup.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listEnter a new owner, Roman Abramovich, and the rest – of their modern era – is history.The…

Andy Burnham will give mayors new powers to take control of local planning decisions and greenlight large-scale developments in proposals to be presented next week.The move will allow mayors to “call in” the decisions and direct councils to take them forward or refuse them. They will also be able to grant upfront permission so developers can start building without having to apply.The move is intended to stop “nimby” councils blocking major developments that could boost local growth or help the government move towards its target of building 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament.But Burnham said it could also…

This is a vulnerable confession, but I spend way too much time on the social media of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Whether he is seemingly effortlessly speaking Mandarin, hanging out with kids or charmingly accepting that he should wear a cycle helmet, the man with the million-watt smile is my antidepressant. (Even more vulnerable confession: I believe, irrationally, he is looking after my elder son, who lives there.)This means that I know all about Mamdani’s fight against what Business Insider recently deemed the “annoyance economy” – daily frustrations that make you poorer or drive you slowly, miserably mad.…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on GTA VI and the state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.Four years ago, fans got a long-awaited look at Grand Theft Auto VI with a huge cache of videos that showed off Rockstar’s latest open-world epic. There were 90 videos in total, providing a glimpse at the next-generation take on Vice City, introducing the game’s new dual protagonists, and generally showing off the…

Frontier open-weight models are shipping faster than the hardware assumptions around them. Kimi-K3, GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash are closing the capability gap with proprietary systems, but releasing parameters only determines who can obtain a model — not who can afford to run it. Serving them still assumes datacenter-class GPU clusters, and as agentic workloads push inference demand up, that cost lands hardest on individual developers and small teams. Meanwhile, more than a hundred million consumer machines already carry discrete GPUs. A team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UT Austin propose FreeToken. The research team argued the missing piece is not…

Shareholders of Chaince Digital Holdings, a crypto treasury firm, will decide Monday whether to increase the company’s authorized ordinary shares from 1 billion to 20 billion and give its board broad reverse-split authority. The vote comes days after Chaince established an at-the-market program allowing up to $300 million of stock sales.Approval would give the board substantially wider options for future financing and capital management. Actual share issuance and any reverse split would remain subject to later company action, making Monday’s decision a vote on the scale of that authority.The authority shareholders are weighingProposal Three would create 19 billion additional authorized…