Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Sydney Marathon admits ‘unfortunate error’ on medal depicting Munich stadiumOrganisers of next weekend’s Sydney Marathon have said they are “not going to run from” the “unfortunate error” that saw a stadium in Germany represented on their participation medal, instead of the very similarly named stadium in Sydney.As we reported earlier, one side of the recently revealed medal appears to feature a stadium that looks like the Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany, rather than Allianz Stadium in Sydney (which the marathon route passes).The detail on the medal depicting the wrong stadium. Photograph: sydney_marathonA TCS Sydney Marathon spokesperson said in a statement…

Inherent, a London AI lab founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its AI agent just outperformed much larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI using a fraction of the size. Of all the startups launched by Google DeepMind alumni, Inherent has gotten relatively little attention. But while better-funded rivals have yet to show the world anything concrete, the London-based team is starting to share what it’s been building. Just weeks after emerging from stealth with a $50 million seed round, the British startup says its newly released AI agent, Faraday, has outperformed larger, better-known models at a specific task: independently reproducing…

In this tutorial, we build an in-depth NeMo Guardrails pipeline that demonstrates how layered guardrails can control an LLM-based financial assistant across the full request lifecycle. We combine deterministic PII detection and redaction, LLM-based input and output self-checks, retrieval filtering, account-number masking, topical restrictions, and policy-based tool gating. We also implement stateful multi-turn interactions, detailed rail activation tracing, token accounting, and a red-team-style coverage report, so we can evaluate whether the assistant responds safely, which control handles each request, and what computational cost that protection adds. !pip install -q nemoguardrails import os, re, json, getpass, textwrap from typing import Optional…

In March 2026, an internal AI agent at Meta triggered a “Sev 1” incident after sensitive company and user data was exposed to employees who weren’t authorized to access it. The incident began when a Meta employee posted a technical question on an internal forum. An engineer used an approved AI agent to analyze it, but the agent posted its response publicly without approval. The employee followed its advice, inadvertently making a large volume of sensitive data available to unauthorized engineers for over two hours. This was not shadow AI. The tool was approved, but the AI behaved in ways…

Hazync’s developer reports that a 1.7 MB standalone verifier checked a 226,434-byte cryptographic receipt covering the first 1,789 blocks of Bitcoin in 27 milliseconds. The Aug. 15 disclosure limits that result to an early stretch of Bitcoin’s history. A complete genesis-to-tip proof campaign remains unfinished.Hazync is a research prototype that uses RISC Zero’s zero-knowledge virtual machine, or zkVM, to make Bitcoin validation reusable. The zkVM executes the validation program, and the resulting receipt gives other users a compact file to check. The developer’s design concentrates proof generation among provers and leaves receipt verification to a much larger population.Those two jobs…

Worker bees normally serve as a colony’s first line of defense against contamination, filtering harmful substances before they can spread through the hive. But new research shows that queen bees also have a defense of their own. When honeybee queens are exposed to pesticides over time, some of those chemicals can accumulate in their bodies and then be transferred into their eggs. Researchers call this process maternal offloading. The findings, published in Current Biology, provide the first evidence in honeybees of how far a queen may go to reduce her own chemical burden. The research was led by the University…

The warning comes as US President Donald Trump threatens to isolate Iran economically, to weaken its government.By Reuters and The Associated PressPublished On 22 Aug 202622 Aug 2026Iran has threatened to treat nearby countries as enemies and target their interests if they join a United States campaign to cripple its economy.Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued the warning in a Saturday interview with state broadcaster IRIB.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list“We’re telling all nearby countries not to join the US economic war. Otherwise, we will consider them as enemies,” Rezaei told IRIB.His remarks come…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 141, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I’m newish here too, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been getting back into the Installer groove, trying out some ergonomic Switch 2 grips I bought on Etsy, researching bike stuff because I’m about to get a Velotric e-bike, inching my way through the fourth book in The Dark Tower series, trying to figure out what feels off about Sonic in the new Fortnite season, wondering why Mark…

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated an attack that revives expired Visa contactless credit cards for real in-store purchases by rewriting the expiration date a point-of-sale (POS) terminal reads over near-field communication (NFC), without breaking any of the card’s cryptography. The attack, which the researchers named “Zombie Card,” requires physical possession of the expired card or sustained NFC proximity to it, plus a man-in-the-middle (MitM) relay positioned between the card and the terminal. It also requires that the account remain open under the same primary account number (PAN), which is standard practice when an issuer sends a…

In brief Bitcoin climbed 7.9% over 24 hours to around $77,137—up 23.2% on the week—after touching an intraday high of $79,320. The rally triggered a short squeeze, with CoinGlass logging about $1.5 billion in total crypto liquidations across 178,777 traders in 24 hours—roughly $1.21 billion of it in shorts. The surge follows a week of bullish Washington sentiment, including Trump backing the Clarity Act and signaling regulators are working to bring Hyperliquid onshore.. Bitcoin extended its rally on Friday, punishing traders who had bet against it and wiping out more than a billion dollars in bearish positions.The largest cryptocurrency changed…