Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Bitcoin’s BIP-110-enforcing branch stalled at block 961,633 on Sunday after producing only two blocks, while the non-enforcing chain advanced to 961,721, widening the gap to 88 blocks. According to the BIP-110 monitor, updated at 10:19 am UTC, the branch’s latest block had been mined about 12 hours earlier. Ocean records show that a pseudonymous mining group called Roughnecks produced the branch’s first two blocks using Ocean’s Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining (DATUM) mining protocol. The divergence began after BIP-110 entered mandatory signaling at block 961,632 on Saturday. Only 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks, or 2.53%, signaled support. During this window,…

When Israel launched its latest war against Hezbollah in March, the first targets the military warned it would strike were not weapons depots or underground command centers.They were banks.Israeli fighter jets leveled more than a dozen branches of a shadowy financial institution known as Al-Qard al-Hassan, long accused of operating as Hezbollah’s bank in Lebanon. More airstrikes followed on exchange shops that Iran used to funnel money to Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy, and on gas stations that generated revenue for the group.With these strikes, Israel was sending a clear message: Hezbollah’s money, not only its arsenal, was in the cross…

Andy Burnham is to undertake a national tour this coming week as he aims to improve the government’s connection with the British public during his premiership.The prime minister is expected to announce a set of policies that will help people financially as many struggle with the cost of living, as well as indicate his intent to improve high streets across the country.Burnham has previously given the public “breathing space” since succeeding Keir Starmer in the role last month, but is said to be in “listening mode” as he tours Britain and pushes his “10-year plan to bring back hope”.While an…

The prime minister is set to announce “a series of measures to make life easier” for those struggling with the cost of living in the coming days, Downing Street says.No 10 says Andy Burnham’s plans are to “give people some room to breathe”. He will also focus on ways of “improving high streets” as he embarks on a tour of the UK.But the government is facing continued pressure over its early release scheme for prisoners in England and Wales – with criticism of the fact that two of PC Andrew Harper’s killers will be eligible from next year.Burnham is also…

More details continue to trickle out about OpenAI’s mysterious new hardware device — described previously as an AI-fueled smart speaker that will be the “physical manifestation” of ChatGPT. Bloomberg now reports that the device will be “donut-shaped,” designed thusly to allow users to carry it around their home and place it in different locations, like a bedside table or a kitchen counter. It will be constructed from “high-quality metal,” have a “premium look,” and (in a detail that mystifies) will have distinct “moving parts,” sources told Bloomberg. It also could be slightly more expensive than your average smart speaker, perhaps…

Swati KhandelwalAug 07, 2026Web Security / Vulnerability PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted research system built by James Kettle, generated and proved new HTTP desynchronization techniques after exploring 30,000 candidate desync vectors. PortSwigger said a separate human-guided discovery cascade also exposed a zero-day in Apache Traffic Server. Kettle said HTTP Terminator tested 30,000 websites where scanning was authorized through bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure programs and found roughly 700 vulnerable targets before deeper validation and RQP research. Kettle said those findings involved banks, government infrastructure, security products, and an airport. The research produced new desync triggers, a dual-matching…

BTCPay Server has temporarily restricted public remote connections to Lightning Network nodes running Lightning Network Daemon (LND) software after attackers exploited a critical vulnerability to obtain credentials and move funds. BTCPay said the restriction prevents external wallets such as Zeus from connecting through a BTCPay Server domain or Tor onion address on Docker deployments. BTCPay said Lightning payments can continue and that it plans to restore the remote-access option when it considers it safe. Version 2.4.2 installs LND version 0.21.1 and automatically regenerates the macaroon credentials on standard BTCPay installations. The project advised operators to check for unauthorized payments, unexpected channel closures,…

As the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show’s stranger storylines. When Dani “Football is life!” Rojas gets injured, his teammates blame the incident on a curse said to haunt the treatment room.Absurd? Perhaps. But sports curses aren’t just fictional plot devices. Football is fertile ground for stories of mysterious forces, blamed for everything from missed penalties to decades of failure.Take Mayo’s Gaelic football team. After they won the All-Ireland title in 1951, the story goes that a local priest cursed them, declaring they would not win another final until every member of…

Until a few years ago, a small stream meandered down a long valley flanked by sheer ridges in Umiujaq, a subarctic village in northern Quebec. The waterway had pretty much hewed to that course since the earth’s crust rebounded after the last ice age.Newcomers from the south, though, had other ideas.A crew of bucktoothed, paddle-tailed beavers has erected five dams, the most impressive being as tall as a city bus and even longer. The sound of cascading water is heard half a mile away. Toads paddle inside the large ponds that now pockmark the valley, beneficiaries of the hydrological attenuation…

Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, thought he was going to make himself a political pariah when he announced publicly that he did not believe in God.Mr. Huffman, the only self-declared “humanist” in Congress, found that constituents in his mostly liberal Northern California district were unfazed.Now Mr. Huffman has written a book in which he takes on how religion influences politics in America, in which he argues that extreme Christian nationalism, embraced and enabled by influential Republicans, is the country’s most dangerous political movement. He also accuses many of his own Democratic colleagues of being “incapable” of naming and confronting…