Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

OpenAI will not release its new AI model – GPT-6.1 Astra – due to safety concerns, the ChatGPT-maker confirmed on Tuesday.The AI system – which performs tasks like browsing the web and using apps by itself – “didn’t quite meet the bar” of the company’s standards, Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said.On Tuesday, OpenAI also issued an update on incidents, that occurred in June but were not made public until last week, in which its models accessed Australian government websites and systems without authorisation.Those incidents and similar breaches by models developed by major AI firms have in…

The District of Columbia Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF) is notifying nearly 400,000 people that their personal information was potentially compromised in a data breach. According to the agency, the incident impacts Medicaid and the DC Healthcare Alliance beneficiaries who enrolled between 2023 and 2026. The data breach was not the result of hacking. Instead, DHCF discovered in July that two reports on its website contained hidden personal information accessible to unauthorized individuals. “These reports were intended to display only summary information about groups of people, such as enrollment counts and other statistics, and did not show anyone’s personal…

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey has appeared to slam Reform Party leader Nigel Farage’s use of Bitcoin.  In a Monday speech, the finance minister said that Nigel Farage — a pro-crypto member of parliament — was “Liz Truss with a Bitcoin account.”  Farage, who is leading the increasingly popular Reform Party, has come under fire recently for receiving donations from crypto entrepreneurs. Liz Truss was the UK’s shortest serving Prime Minister who was heavily criticised for her debt-fueled 2022 mini budget.  “Nigel Farage — he wants you to think he’s a man of the people,” Healey said. “But…

Editor’s Note: This advisory was updated on Sept. 28, 2026, with ticketing information for the public. The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission will participate in an event hosted by industry and community partners at the University of Houston to discuss their mission around the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It will be the first event in Houston for the public following their lunar mission earlier this year and marks the conclusion of their post-flight campaign. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch of NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen will share highlights from their…

OpenAI will not release its newest artificial intelligence model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing by the ChatGPT-maker revealed it did not meet safety standards, the company confirmed Monday. The news comes one day before the AI giant hosts an annual developer conference known as OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco, where the company is expected to make several announcements — though it is unclear if a new version of Astra will be among them. Astra 6.1 was an improvement over previous models in some aspects, but “it didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within apologised Monday for not properly…

John Healey cheered the Labour faithful with his first conference speech as chancellor, offering an upbeat vision of a reindustrialised Britain with fresh opportunities for young people, but he gave little sense of how he intends to pay for Andy Burnham’s radical plans.Healey’s budget next month is widely seen both inside and outside Labour as the moment when the prime minister’s radical rhetoric about ditching 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy risks crashing into fiscal reality.With the global bond sell-off driving up government borrowing costs, and eye-watering energy prices likely to push up household bills in the new year, he did…

OpenAI had planned to release yet another AI model next month, but has decided to nix the release over safety concerns. The Wall Street Journal reports that Astra 6.1 was scheduled to be released as soon as within the next few days. However, the model “showed higher levels of deception” than previous models and exhibited unsafe behavior, the Journal writes. Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the WSJ that the model tested poorly on alignment, a measure of how well the program adheres to human intent. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update the article…

Japanese car-sharing service Times Car has confirmed that approximately 6.6 million user accounts were compromised in a cyberattack disclosed late last week. The company announced the incident on September 25, saying that a third party had accessed its systems at the beginning of the month. Times Car took action to block the unauthorized access on September 26. At the time, the company said it was investigating whether the attackers accessed members’ personal information, but confirmed the data theft in an update earlier today. The company says that the intrusion affects 6.6 million current and former Times Car members, and also…

A new on-chain reconstruction says COMP acquired, through Compound DAO reserves, a majority of all delegated voting power at a May snapshot. That position did not change the recorded result that Proposal 582 passed with zero votes against.Bitquery says 344,780 COMP arrived in a DAO reserve wallet at 09:46 UTC on May 5, 58 minutes before the snapshot fixed voting power. That wallet had delegated its votes to the Compound Foundation, which backed the plan.The link between the reserves spent and the COMP received runs through a Binance account, and public chain data alone cannot prove the withdrawal’s funding account.The…

Written by Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University  Sept. 21, 2026 After a long hiatus, the Perseverance rover updates page is back. A lot has happened on Mars in the meantime, and with regular updates now resuming, there is plenty to catch up on — Perseverance has been busy. The rover has spent 2026 exploring the “Lac de Charmes” area, an area of valleys and ridges west of the Jezero crater rim that represent a “wild west frontier” for the mission. The rocks in this area are among the oldest Perseverance has encountered. They formed when Mars was…