ICT news

• A New Attack Allows Intercepting Or Blocking Of Every LTE Phone Call And Text

  24-10-2016 05:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  All LTE networks and devices are vulnerable to a new attack demonstrated at the Ruxon security conference in Melbourne. mask.of.sanity shared this article from The Register:
  It exploits LTE fall-back mechanisms designed to ensure continuity of phone services in the event of emergency situations that trigger base station overloads... The attacks work through a series of messages sent between malicious base stations spun up by attackers and targeted phones. It results in attackers gaining a man-in
  
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• Chinese Cities Are Sinking Rapidly

  19-04-2024 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Major cities across China are sinking, putting a substantial portion of the country's rapidly urbanizing population in harm's way in the coming decades, according to a sweeping new analysis by Chinese scientists. Subsidence is the technical term for when land sinks relative to its surroundings, and it's a major threat for cities around the world. It accelerates local sea level rise from climate change, because the land is getting lower as the ocean g
  
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• FBI Says Chinese Hackers Preparing To Attack US Infrastructure

  19-04-2024 12:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt Un
  
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• Northrop Grumman Working With SpaceX On US Spy Satellite System

  19-04-2024 09:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Reuters: Aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman is working with SpaceX [...] on a classified spy satellite project already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth, according to people familiar with the program. The program, details of which were first reported by Reuters last month, is meant to enhance the U.S. government's ability to track military and intelligence targets from low-Earth orbits, providing high-resolution im
  
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• Reddit Is Taking Over Google

  19-04-2024 05:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: If you think you've been seeing an awful lot more Reddit results lately when you search on Google, you're not imagining things. The internet is in upheaval, and for website owners the rules of "winning" Google Search have never been murkier. Google's generative AI search engine is coming from one direction. It's creeping closer to mainstream deployment and bringing an existential crisis for SEOs and website makers everywhere. Coming from
  
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• Ubuntu 24.04 Yields a 20% Performance Advantage Over Windows 11 On Ryzen 7 Framework Laptop

  19-04-2024 03:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation. The Framework 16 review unit
  
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• Netflix Blows Past Earnings Estimates As Subscribers Jump 16%

  19-04-2024 02:45 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: "As we've noted in previous letters, we're focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics -- and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction," the company said in i
  
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• Frontier Communications Shuts Down Systems After Cyberattack

  19-04-2024 02:02 via it.slashdot.org
  
  U.S. telecom provider Frontier Communications shut down its systems after a cybercrime group breached some of its IT systems in a recent cyberattack. BleepingComputer reports: Frontier is a leading U.S. communications provider that provides gigabit Internet speeds over a fiber-optic network to millions of consumers and businesses across 25 states. After discovering the incident, the company was forced to partially shut down some systems to prevent the threat actors from laterally moving through
  
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• Cops Can Force Suspect To Unlock Phone With Thumbprint, US Court Rules

  19-04-2024 01:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law. The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the
  
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• Software Glitch Saw Aussie Casino Give Away Millions In Cash

  19-04-2024 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A software glitch in the "ticket in, cash out" (TICO) machines at Star Casino in Sydney, Australia, saw it inadvertently give away $2.05 million over several weeks. This glitch allowed gamblers to reuse a receipt for slot machine winnings, leading to unwarranted cash payouts which went undetected due to systematic failures in oversight and audit processes. The Register reports: News of the giveaway emerged on Monday at an independent inquiry into the casino, which has had years of compliance tro
  
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• Meta Is Adding Real-Time AI Image Generation To WhatsApp

  19-04-2024 00:00 via meta.slashdot.org
  
  WhatsApp users in the U.S. will soon see support for real-time AI image generation. The Verge reports: As soon as you start typing a text-to-image prompt in a chat with Meta AI, you'll see how the image changes as you add more detail about what you want to create. In the example shared by Meta, a user types in the prompt, "Imagine a soccer game on mars." The generated image quickly changes from a typical soccer player to showing an entire soccer field on a Martian landscape. If you have access t
  
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• Colorado Bill Aims To Protect Consumer Brain Data

  18-04-2024 23:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Consumers have grown accustomed to the prospect that their personal data, such as email addresses, social contacts, browsing history and genetic ancestry, are being collected and often resold by the apps and the digital services they use. With the advent of consumer neurotechnologies, the data being collected is becoming ever more intimate. One headband serves as a personal meditation coach by monitoring the user's brain activity. Anot
  
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• Feds Hit Coding Boot Camp With Big Fine For Allegedly Conning Students

  18-04-2024 22:42 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech -- formerly known as Lambda School -- with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices. From a report: The business, which claims on its site it will help students land their "dream job" in tech at companies like Amazon, Cisco, and Google, accepted the consent order without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. In an announcement yesterday, the CFPB said it had taken action against BloomTech
  
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• Crypto Trader Eisenberg Convicted of Fraud in $110 Million Mango Markets Scheme

  18-04-2024 22:01 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A jury found Avraham "Avi" Eisenberg guilty on all three counts of fraud and manipulation in a $110 million crypto trade scheme using the Mango Markets platform. Axios: The case was the first known test for a jury to decide whether existing U.S. laws governing fraud and market manipulation apply to the world of decentralized finance (DeFi). The 28-year-old Eisenberg will be held to account for his actions on Oct. 11, 2022, when a series of trades he made intentionally boosted the price of Mango
  
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• Boeing Aims To Bring Flying Cars To Asia By 2030

  18-04-2024 21:22 via news.slashdot.org
  
  U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities. Nikkei: Boeing Chief Technology Officer Todd Citron revealed the plans in an interview with Nikkei. The company is developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft at subsidiary Wisk Aero. The aircraft will adopt autonomous technology, rare among eVTOL craft. The plan is to first obtain
  
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• Nigeria To Criminalise Fiber Cable Damage Costing Telecoms Billions

  18-04-2024 20:41 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Nigeria will criminalize the destruction of broadband fiber cables following repeated complaints by MTN Nigeria and other telecommunications companies that they are losing billions of naira, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Nigeria's works ministry, which supervises federal road constructors, is finalizing the regulation that will be signed as an executive order by President Bola Tinubu, said the people, asking not to be identified as they weren't
  
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• Author Granted Copyright Over Book With AI-Generated Text - With a Twist

  18-04-2024 20:00 via slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. Copyright Office has granted a copyright registration to Elisa Shupe, a retired U.S. Army veteran, for her novel "AI Machinations: Tangled Webs and Typed Words," which extensively used OpenAI's ChatGPT in its creation. The registration is among the first for creative works incorporating AI-generated text, but with a significant caveat - Shupe is considered the author of the "selection, coordination, and arrangement" of the AI-generated content, not the text itself.
  Shupe, who writes und
  
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• Hackers Are Threatening To Publish a Huge Stolen Sanctions and Financial Crimes Watchlist

  18-04-2024 19:22 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A financially motivated criminal hacking group says it has stolen a confidential database containing millions of records that companies use for screening potential customers for links to sanctions and financial crime. The hackers, which call themselves GhostR, said they stole 5.3 million records from the World-Check screening database in March and are threatening to publish the data online.
  World-Check is a screening database used for "know your customer" che
  
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• Meta Releases Llama 3 AI Models, Claiming Top Performance

  18-04-2024 18:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Meta debuted a new version of its powerful Llama AI model, its latest effort to keep pace with similar technology from companies like OpenAI, X and Google. The company describes Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B, containing 8 billion and 70 billion parameters respectively, as a "major leap" in performance compared to their predecessors.
  Meta claims that the Llama 3 models, trained on custom-built 24,000 GPU clusters, are among the best-performing generative AI models available for their respective para
  
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• Google is Combining Its Android and Hardware Teams

  18-04-2024 18:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called "Platforms and Devices" that will oversee all of Google's Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. From a report: The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google's hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS, will be taking on othe
  
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• Canadian Science Gets Biggest Boost To PhD and Postdoc Pay in 20 Years

  18-04-2024 17:24 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers in Canada got most of what they were hoping for in the country's 2024 federal budget, with a big boost in postgraduate pay and more funding for research and scientific infrastructure. From a report: "We are investing over $5 billion in Canadian brainpower," said finance minister Chrystia Freeland in her budget speech on 16 April. "More funding for research and scholarships will help Canada attract the next generation of game-changing thinkers."
  Postgraduate students and postdoctoral
  
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• Odds of US TikTok Ban Increase After House Fast-Tracks Revised Bill, Picking Up Key Senate Support

  18-04-2024 16:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  U.S. lawmakers have moved closer to enacting a countrywide ban on TikTok. From a report: Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill by a wide margin that would ban distribution of TikTok in U.S. unless TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, sells its ownership in the app within 165 days of the law's enactment. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson issued a new proposal that would extend the sale requirement deadline to nine months, with a potential for a 90-day extension -- addressin
  
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• US Air Force Confirms First Successful AI Dogfight

  18-04-2024 16:07 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The US Air Force is putting AI in the pilot's seat. In an update on Thursday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed that an AI-controlled jet successfully faced a human pilot during an in-air dogfight test carried out last year. From a report: DARPA began experimenting with AI applications in December 2022 as part of its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. It worked to develop an AI system capable of autonomously flying a fighter jet, while also adhering to the Air Force
  
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• Google Terminates 28 Employees For Protest of Israeli Cloud Contract

  18-04-2024 15:07 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google said on Thursday it had terminated 28 employees after some staff participated in protests against the company's cloud contract with the Israeli government. From a report: The Alphabet unit said a small number of protesting employees entered and disrupted work at a few unspecified office locations. "Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior," the company said in a st
  
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• Oracle Releases Critical Patch Update Advisory for April 2024

  18-04-2024 14:00 via cisa.gov
  Oracle released its quarterly Critical Patch Update Advisory for April 2024 to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. A cyber threat actor could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. 
  Users and administrators are encouraged to review the following Critical Patch Update Advisory and apply the necessary updates:  April 2024 Critical Patch Update Advisory
  
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• Inside Amazon's Secret Operation To Gather Intel on Rivals

  18-04-2024 14:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called "Big River," WSJ reports. The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. From the report: For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells aro
  
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• CISA and Partners Release Advisory on Akira Ransomware

  18-04-2024 14:00 via cisa.gov
  Today, CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), and the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL) released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: Akira Ransomware, to disseminate known Akira ransomware tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) identified through FBI investigations as recently as February 2024.
  Evolving from an initial focus on Windows systems to a Linu
  
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• Is 8GB of RAM Enough For a Mac?

  18-04-2024 12:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Apple is doubling down on 8GB of RAM for many of its entry-level Macs, claiming that it's "suitable for many tasks," including browsing, video streaming and even "light" video and image editing. As of this writing, all MacBook Air laptops, the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro 14 all start with a base configuration of 8GB RAM -- which can't be upgraded at a later date since the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard. "That might have been OK were it not for the fact that Apple charges a ridiculous $20
  
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• Sweden Becomes 38th Country To Sign NASA's Artemis Accords For Moon Exploration

  18-04-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Sweden is the newest nation to sign onto NASA's Artemis Accords -- a series of non-binding bilateral arrangements for peaceful and responsible exploration. Space.com reports: During a signing event in Stockholm on Tuesday (April 16), Swedish Minister for Education Mats Persson penned the agreement alongside U.S. Ambassador Erik D. Ramanathan. "By joining the Artemis Accords, Sweden strengthens its strategic space partnership with the U.S. on space covering areas such as Swedish space research an
  
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• House Passes Bill Requiring Warrant To Purchase Data From Third Parties

  18-04-2024 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The House on Wednesday approved a bill that would limit how the government can purchase data from third parties — legislation that scored a vote after negotiations with a group of GOP colleagues who briefly tanked a vote on warrantless spy powers. Dubbed the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale, the legislation passed 219-199. It requires law enforcement and other government entities to get a warrant before buying information from third-party
  
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