Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Target has set itself apart from big-box retailers like Walmart by offering trendy clothes, home goods from reality TV stars, and, of course, in-store Starbucks. With malls and traditional department stores in decline, Target has even become the go-to destination for stay-at-home parents who need to get out of the house (and maybe get a Frappuccino). In recent years, the store has cemented its position as a notch above similar retailers with exclusive products that feel more high-end, while still being affordable and regularly holding sales for even more savings. Target carries everything from outdoor gear to clothes to tech and grocery items. Save on your shopping spree…

Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Audio-3.1, a 5-model audio stack spanning ASR, TTS and realtime interaction. The main model is Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime, a full-duplex speech model built for voice agents that call tools. Qwen also cut prices: about 85% on Realtime, about 70% on TTS and up to 95% on ASR. Is it deployable? Yes, as a managed API. qwen-audio-3.1-realtime-plus is live on QwenCloud over WebSocket. No open weights were announced. What Ships on QwenCloud The model page lists text and audio as both input and output. Context is 262K tokens, with 245K max input and 16K max output. Default limits…

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget has resumed Bitcoin withdrawals suspended after suspected North Korean hackers breached its systems last week and stole over $350 million. Bitget added that it has addressed the security vulnerability exploited in the incident and will restore withdrawal services for all other supported assets and networks as soon as possible. It also shared an estimated withdrawal resumption schedule, saying that it will also resume withdrawals for ETH (Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism) on September 29 at 8:00 UTC, for USDT (Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Tron) on September 30 at 8:00 UTC, and for other tokens / Fiat / P2P…

Stablecoin issuer Tether said it helped authorities freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT during 2026, as a Senate Democrat called for an investigation into the stablecoin issuer on Monday.In a statement on Monday, the company said it has been working closely with international law enforcement for years. This year alone, it froze more than $130 million in USDT across four wallets, and in April, it froze more than $344 million linked to the Central Bank of Iran. “Tether has consistently demonstrated that USDT is not a haven for sanctioned actors, terrorist organizations or criminal networks,” said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino.  The…

In summer 2026, scientists took to the air to intercept and study the towering, smoke-infused clouds that wildland fires sometimes create. But during an August 11 flight over the Sand Creek fire in Montana, they came back with a bonus—observations of an ephemeral pileus cloud hovering atop one of the towering fire clouds. Smooth, veil-like pileus clouds are well-known to atmospheric scientists and cloud lovers and regarded as signs of especially vigorous convection. But researchers rarely observe a pileus cloud interacting with a fire cloud—known as a pyrocumulus (pyroCu)—in as much detail as they did on this flight, part of NASA’s…

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me more than 16,000 times – as OpenAI agents did to a UN public data hub while repeatedly trying to find its way around the UN’s cyber-blocks – and perhaps it’s time to admit the system we have for keeping AI agents under control isn’t working particularly well.The news about AI systems cropping up in places they shouldn’t sounds alarming. Though the description of these as “hacks” is perhaps overstating things, AI has exploited issues in IT systems that humans simply haven’t got around to finding. It’s…

Leader of the Catholic Church says AI safety issues should be taken seriously and acted on.Published On 29 Sep 202629 Sep 2026Pope Leo has said that concerns about artificial intelligence going rogue are not “fake news” and should be taken seriously, insisting that safety issues raised by AI experts should be discussed and acted on.Leo, who dedicated his first encyclical to AI and protecting humanity in its wake, was asked during a news conference on Monday about what the United States and China especially should be doing to prevent AI from posing catastrophic risks to humanity.Recommended Stories list of 4…

It is a brave party leader who is prepared to go into an election promising a multibillion-pound new public service – likely to be funded by tax rises or holding back increases in the state pension.But Andy Burnham’s colleagues are excited about the confident promise of new social care system that seven previous prime ministers have failed to deliver.“I’m not worried about it because we have time to make the case,” said one cabinet minister, who was asked about the difficulty of getting voters on board.David Cameron’s team is credited with inventing the political metaphor of “pitch-rolling” – borrowing from…

Anthropic devoted nearly a third of its hotly anticipated IPO prospectus to risk factors, according to the Financial Times, which says it has reviewed the filing in recent days. The filing details specific, worrisome behaviors that Anthropic says its models have already shown or could show, including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information,” and behavior “resembling blackmail,” according to Reuters. The disclosures are decidedly grim for a company whose own backers believe it could list above $2 trillion, more than double its $965 billion valuation from May, in potentially the biggest IPO ever. It’s a strange position…

The summer of 2026 taught the security industry a new phrase: the stolen AI login. In late August, as BleepingComputer reported, Anthropic responded to infostealer-driven hijacking of Claude sessions by signing users out, wiping saved payment methods, and refunding charges it identified as unauthorized. That is the supply side. SOCRadar’s AI Identity Exposure Report goes after the demand side: the enterprises whose employees are the credentials being sold. Starting from more than one million infostealer records tied to AI services across 80,000-plus corporate domains, the research narrowed the set to 482 major established enterprises to answer a single question: when…