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Fact-check: Webpage impersonating Dawn circulates false report about 'AI platform'

A webpage impersonating Dawn was online and accessible on Thursday. The page shared fake news and disinformation while pretending to be part of the Dawn Media Group. The website is not part of, associated with or has any connection to the Dawn Media Group. The webpage, operating from a URL not associated with the Dawn.com web domain, has shared a ‘news report’ on business tycoon Arif Habib supposedly launching an AI platform called BTC+700 Lurot, luring readers into investing in it to earn money. The webpage is not hosted on Dawn.com’s website. The story falsely claims that the so-called BTC +700 Lurot project was “created within the framework” of the Pakistan Digital 2030 vision, with the support of the government and “leading Pakistani enterprises”. No information on any such development could be found through a web search. A visual on the webpage falsely claims that Pakistan State Oil (PSO), the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and a made-up “Pakistan...
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Bullet-riddled bodies of 6 kidnapped labourers found in Balochistan's Turbat

QUETTA: The bodies of six of seven labourers who were kidnapped earlier this week in the Turbat city of Balochistan’s Kech district were found with bullet wounds on Thursday, an official told Dawn. On Tuesday, unidentified armed men had blocked Turbat-Mand Road in the Kalatak area of Kech district and taken away the seven labourers, who were travelling in a vehicle. The kidnappers had killed one of the labourers the same day and dumped his body on a highway. On Thursday, the bodies of the remaining six labourers were also found, Balochistan Home Department spokesperson Babar Yousafzai told Dawn . He said the kidnappers had taken the labourers to an undisclosed location, where one of them was killed shortly after the abduction and his body was dumped on the highway. They later also killed the six remaining labourers, whose bodies were found in Turbat’s Nasirabad area, he added. Yousafzai said the bodies bore torture marks and bullet wounds, and it seemed that the labourers had be...
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OpenAI's rogue agent compromised a customer at a second tech firm, executive says

The rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company New York-based Modal Labs, according to a Modal executive and two other sources familiar with the matter. AI models that underpin tools like chatbots and image generators are known as agents when they act autonomously to carry out tasks in the real world. Modal executives emphasised that the company itself was not hacked. According to a timeline published by Hugging Face on Tuesday, the rogue agent broke into a sandbox, or an isolated testing environment, “hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure” before turning it into a launchpad for the broader hack. The third-party provider was not named in the blog post, but Modal’s chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, said the agent exploited vulnerable code written by a customer that was hosted on Modal’s platform. Modal sa...
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Govt aims to provide citizens access to all public facilities under single digital ID: PM Shehbaz

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Wednesday that the government’s vision for national digitalisation aims to provide citizens access to all public facilities under a single digital identity. Chairing a review meeting in Islamabad on the implementation of a national-level integrated digital policy framework, PM Shehbaz said that implementing this vision in line with modern-day demands held “key importance” in forming an integrated society, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). “After the full implementation of the national digital vision, citizens will be able to access all public facilities, including government verification of documents, banking services, health, transfers, and all other facilities, under a single digital ID at one place,” the statement cited the premier as saying. It added that a meeting of the National Digital Commission (NDC) should be convened soon in order to take all stakeholders into confidence on the policy, including the...
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Security forces kill 32 terrorists during operations in KP, Balochistan: ISPR

Security forces have killed 32 terrorists during operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan over the last 24 hours, the military’s media affairs wing said in a statement released on Wednesday. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said “comprehensive joint operations” were carried out in various parts of the two provinces, in continuation of action against the “terrorists nexus of India-sponsored Fitna-al-Khawarij and Fitna-al-Hindustan ”. The state uses the term Fitna-al-Khawarij for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and has designated Balochistan-based groups as Fitna-al-Hindustan to highlight India’s alleged role in terrorism and destabilisation across Pakistan. ISPR said that the operations in KP and Balochistan were aimed at weeding out terrorists and their facilitators. Multiple “intelligence-based area sanitisation and targeted operations” were conducted in KP’s Khyber on July 28 and 29, during which 24 terrorists belonging to Fitna-al-Khawarij wer...
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Firefighters in France, Spain scramble to contain blazes as new heatwave looms

Firefighters raced on Tuesday to subdue huge wildfires that have forced unprecedented evacuations of tens of thousands of people across France and Spain, as western Europe braced for another heatwave. The fires have torn through a region already battered by a blisteringly hot and dry summer. Crews were seeking to capitalise on more favourable weather before a new wave of higher temperatures settled in from Wednesday. In the Bordeaux region of France, firefighters contained the forest blaze overnight, while in Spain, authorities allowed people from nine out of 11 towns in the central Toledo province to return to their homes. However, fires still raged out of control in Madrid and nearby provinces, prompting heightened vigilance. One Spanish evacuee described a “red hell” of fire, portraying intense scenes as residents fled with little more than clothes on their backs. Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent, has endured record-breaking heatwaves ...
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Probe finds PML-N MPA Saqib Chadhar guilty of harassing actor Momina Iqbal, NCCIA official tells Lahore court

LAHORE: A National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) official on Tuesday informed a sessions court that PML-N MPA Saqib Chadhar had been found guilty of harassing actor Momina Iqbal after investigation. NCCIA Lahore Station House Officer (SHO) Najam Bajwa shared this as Additional District and Sessions Judge Nusrat Ali Siddiqui took up pre-arrest bail petitions of the MPA and his wife, who was also named in the first information report registered after Iqbal’s harassment allegations. Chadhar and his wife appeared before the court upon the expiry of their previous pre-arrest interim bail. During the hearing, SHO Najam Bajwa informed the court that the investigation against Chadhar had been completed and he had been found guilty of the allegations levelled by Iqbal. He further told the court that Chadhar’s wife had surrendered her mobile phone to NCCIA two days ago and the device had been sent for forensic examination. For his part, the counsel for Iqbal urged the court to d...
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