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A Russian spy, suddenly cast into the spotlight, flees Japan

A Russian spy at the center of a secret operation to smuggle high-tech weapon components into Russia has left Japan after his activities were disclosed by The New York Times, a senior Ukrainian intelligence official said Thursday.

The operative, Maksim Vladimirovich Filchenkov, 49, had been working undercover in Japan as an employee of Russian state airline Aeroflot. Filchenkov’s role had been the focus of a Times investigation into how Russia exploited Japan’s weak espionage laws.

Filchenkov’s departure was first reported by the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major national newspaper in Japan. The newspaper said the Russian exited Japan after the Times published its investigation July 12. The Ukrainian official who confirmed the spy’s departure did so on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence publicly.

Unraveling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations

The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.

“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the droughts associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe,” said Katherine Power, a doctoral student in the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University and the study’s first author.

Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence

Kimi K3 is available today on Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API. At launch, Kimi K3 will use max thinking effort by default, with low-and high-effort modes to be introduced in subsequent updates. We are currently working closely with inference partners and open-source maintainers to align technical details and ensure a reliable rollout across the ecosystem. The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026. Further details on the architecture, training, and evaluations will be released alongside the Kimi K3 technical report.

Kimi K3 is the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It marks the latest step in Kimi’s sustained push at the scaling frontier: for nine of the past twelve months, Kimi models have set the upper bound of open-model sizes.

Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), two architectural updates designed to improve how information flows across sequence length and model depth. We have also scaled up Mixture of Experts (MoE) sparsity, effectively activating 16 out of 896 experts when paired with a Stable LatentMoE framework. Together with refined training and data recipes, these structural changes yield an approximate 2.5× improvement in overall scaling efficiency compared to Kimi K2, allowing the model to convert compute into intelligence more effectively.

Golden Chickens Resurfaces With Four New Malware Families and Modular Implants

The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings.

The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential theft utility codenamed ChromEggscalator. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group is tracking the group under the moniker TAG-195.

TAG-195 is a financially motivated malware-as-a-service (MaaS) developer whose tooling has been previously linked to TAG-127 as an operator and customer. The threat intelligence company said it has also observed TAG-127 deploying TinyEgg via ClickFix-style social engineering campaigns that trick unsuspecting users into manually executing malicious commands.

Microsoft blames massive Microsoft 365 outage on maintenance bug

Microsoft says a bug in its automated network maintenance request system caused Thursday’s massive outage by mistakenly removing IP routes from more devices than intended, disrupting Azure and Microsoft 365 services.

The outage began at 10:44 AM ET on Thursday, July 23, and mostly affected customers accessing Microsoft 365 services through network infrastructure connected to Microsoft’s West US Azure region.

At 11:11 AM ET, Downdetector had recorded 2,403 outage reports, sharply above its normal baseline of 29. SharePoint accounted for 78% of the complaints, followed by Excel at 11% and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center at 6%.

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this would demonstrate a capacity for symbolic social reference that has rarely been documented in nonhuman communication systems. To evaluate such claims, we propose three minimal criteria for identifying names: individual reference, symbolic represent ation, and shared meaning. We then review the evidence relevant to these criteria in the species for which name-like calls have been suggested: spectacled parrotlets, common marmosets, African elephants, and bottlenose dolphins. Together, these criteria provide a clear and theoretically grounded framework for exploring the use of name-like calls in nonhuman animals.

Simple circuit brings topological insulators closer to practical electrical measurement standards

Researchers at the University of Würzburg have succeeded in detecting exceptionally robust electrical transport in a topological insulator. This could lead to new metrological applications. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Metrology is the science of measurement. Its aim is to ensure that measurement results are comparable and reliable worldwide, for example, in industry or scientific experiments. So-called fundamental constants, or unchanging physical quantities such as the speed of light or Planck’s constant, play an increasingly important role in this context.

As their values are universal, i.e., independent of place and time, they enable the definition of highly stable units and ensure highly reproducible measurement results. Since 2019, the International System of Units, SI (short for Système international d’unités), has been based entirely on these constants.

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