Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

There are obvious similarities between Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who won a close victory on Wednesday in the Democratic Senate primary in the battleground state of Michigan.Both are young, progressive politicians who are also Muslim. They focused their campaigns on lifting the working class. Super PACs marshaled tens of millions of dollars to oppose their candidacies. And both have overcome that resistance as they have helped fuel the Democratic Party’s ascendant left wing.But is it fair to call Dr. El-Sayed Michigan’s “mini-Mamdani,” as some people have begun to do? According to Mr. Mamdani,…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Accounting & Consulting services myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the age of artificial intelligence, what happens to people who sell the human variety? It’s a pressing question for a lot of professions (not least opinion writers), but is especially acute for strategic consultants, who not only sell ideas but charge a lot for them. In other professional services industries such as law and accounting, the provider is paid in part for taking on legal responsibility. Someone has to sign off on accounts or legal opinions, whether they were…

In a talk that was a last-minute addition to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, employees from OpenAI presented new details about a recent, high-profile incident of rogue AI hacking that has created a maelstrom within the AI and cybersecurity industries.About two weeks ago, OpenAI disclosed an incident in which AI agents powered by two of the company’s models escaped containment while looking for the solutions to a cybersecurity benchmarking test and went on a hacking spree culminating in a breach of the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face.In their conference talk on Wednesday, Eric Wallace, who…

A Canadian man pleaded guilty today to his role in accessing company accounts at cloud storage provider Snowflake and stealing data from at least 165 organizations in a scheme to extort millions of dollars from victims. ​26-year-old Connor Riley Moucka, also known as Alexander Moucka and Waifu, was arrested on October 30, 2024, for stealing data of hundreds of millions of individuals from companies using Snowflake’s storage service. Between February and October 2024, Moucka and John Erin Binns, also indicted for these attacks, accessed Snowflake accounts not protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA) using logins stolen via infostealer malware. Without MFA…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country — but citizens won’t be using Bitcoin to pay for goods just yet.  News agency Tass reported Tuesday that the new law will allow only registered entities to operate as exchanges, and puts limits on the amount of crypto retail investors can use.  For now, retail investors are limited to trading most liquid cryptocurrencies, capped at 300,000 rubles ($3,700) per year. Qualified investors have no restrictions, according to the report.  But the new law still prohibits…

The dramatic footage last Thursday of thousands of migrants entering Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta generated an online frenzy among the far right. And the alarmist rhetoric was also evident in the European mainstream, as EU leaders wasted little time attributing the chaotic scenes to Spain’s liberal immigration policies.In a letter organised by Italy and Denmark, and signed by 22 EU heads of government, they appeared to blame the crisis on Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s recent programme to regularise undocumented migrants, which received more than a million applications. They argued that Europe must “[address] all policies that can…