ICT news

• American 'Vigilante Hacker' Defaces Russian Ministry's Website

  23-10-2016 13:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes CNN Money:
  An American vigilante hacker -- who calls himself "The Jester" -- has defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in retaliation for attacks on American targets... "Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message," he wrote. "Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed."In early 2015, CNN
  
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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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• Google Workers Arrested After Nine-Hour Protest In Cloud Chief's Office

  18-04-2024 02:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  CNBC reports that nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night in protest of the company's $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in happened at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office in Sunnyvale and the 10th floor commons of Google's New York office. From the report: The arrests, which were livestreamed on Twitch by participants, follow rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attrac
  
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• TikTok Starts Testing Its Instagram Competitor 'TikTok Notes'

  18-04-2024 01:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  TikTok has started testing its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, in Canada and Australia. TechCrunch reports: The company said on X that it is in the "early stage" of the app's rollout and that the app is "a dedicated space for photo and text content." "We hope that the TikTok community will use TikTok Notes to continue sharing their moments through photo posts. Whether documenting adventures, expressing creativity, or simply sharing snapshots of one's day, the TikTok Notes experience is desig
  
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• Boston Dynamics' New Atlas Robot Is a Swiveling, Shape-Shifting Nightmare

  18-04-2024 01:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: It's alive! A day after announcing it was retiring Atlas, its hydraulic robot, Boston Dynamics has introduced a new, all-electric version of its humanoid machine. The next-generation Atlas robot is designed to offer a far greater range of movement than its predecessor. Boston Dynamics wanted the new version to show that Atlas can keep a humanoid form without limiting "how a bipedal robot can move." The new version has been redesigned with swiveling joints t
  
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• Feds Appoint 'AI Doomer' To Run US AI Safety Institute

  18-04-2024 00:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US AI Safety Institute -- part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—has finally announced its leadership team after much speculation. Appointed as head of AI safety is Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher who pioneered a foundational AI safety technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), but is also known for predicting that "there's a 50 percent chance AI development could end
  
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• AltStore PAL Alternative App Marketplace Launches On iPhone In EU

  17-04-2024 23:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  AltStore PAL has become one of the first alternative app marketplaces to launch in the European Union. Developed by Riley Testut, AltStore PAL is marketed as an open-source project designed to distribute apps from independent developers. MacRumors reports: At launch, it features two apps, including Testut's Delta game emulator and clipboard manager app Clip. Delta is also being simultaneously released in the App Store outside of the European Union, but it looks like EU customers will need to dow
  
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• Trump Media Shares Down 14% After Company Says Truth Social To Launch TV Streaming

  17-04-2024 23:02 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" after it made its stock market debut in late March, announced that its Truth Social platform is moving to launch a live TV streaming platform. Following the news, shares of DJT closed more than 14% lower Tuesday. They ended trading Monday down by more than 18%. CNBC reports: The stock's price has dropped by a whopping 67.7% since Trump Media began trading as a public company on March 26, erasing more
  
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• Hackers Voice Cloned the CEO of LastPass For Attack

  17-04-2024 22:25 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: In a new blog post from LastPass, the password management firm used by countless personal and corporate clients to help protect their login information, the company explains that someone used AI voice-cloning tech to spoof the voice of its CEO in an attempt to trick one of its employees. As the company writes in the post, one of its employees earlier this week received several WhatsApp communications -- including calls, texts, and a voice messag
  
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• What Caused the Storm That Brought Dubai To a Standstill?

  17-04-2024 21:21 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A storm hit the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week bringing record rainfall that flooded highways, inundated houses, grid-locked traffic and trapped people in their homes. [...] In the UAE, a record 254 millimetres (10 inches) of rainfall was recorded in Al Ain, a city bordering Oman. It was the largest ever in a 24-hour period since records started in 1949. Rainfall is rare in the UAE and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, that is typically known for i
  
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• AI Computing Is on Pace To Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says

  17-04-2024 20:42 via slashdot.org
  
  AI's voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources, requiring the industry to change its approach to the technology, according to Arm Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas. From a report: By 2030, the world's data centers are on course to use more electricity than India, the world's most populous country, Haas said. Finding ways to head off that projected tripling of energy use is paramount if artificial intelligence is going to achieve its promise, he said.
  "We are s
  
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• Average World Incomes To Drop By Nearly a Fifth By 2050, Study Says

  17-04-2024 20:01 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C. From a report: Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, a
  
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• Escobar Brother Barred by EU Court From Trademarking Family Name

  17-04-2024 19:22 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Pablo Escobar, the name of the late Colombian drug kingpin, can't be registered as a trademark in the European Union after judges said that approving his brother's bid would go against "principles of morality." From a report: The public "associate that name with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom, rather than with his possible good deeds in favor of the poor in Colombia," the EU's General Court in Luxembourg said on Wednesday. Trademarking
  
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• Amazon Cloud Unit Kills Snowmobile Data Transfer Truck Service

  17-04-2024 18:40 via slashdot.org
  
  At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon's CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities. Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission. From a report: As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has conf
  
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• A Spy Site Is Scraping Discord and Selling Users' Messages

  17-04-2024 18:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  404 Media: An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users' messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service's creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
  T
  
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• Telegram Founder Accuses Google and Apple of Censorship Threat

  17-04-2024 17:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram messaging app, has accused tech giants Google and Apple of threatening to censor content on smartphones [YouTube link]. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov claimed that these companies told Telegram to comply with their guidelines or face removal from their app stores.
  "Those two platforms, they could basically censor everything you can read, access on your smart phone," Durov said. With 900 million active users, Telegram is expected to cross the one b
  
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• Dropbox CEO Says Employees Appreciate Remote Work More Than Cushy Office Perks

  17-04-2024 16:44 via slashdot.org
  
  Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston said he views his employees like customers, and that means giving them what they want -- which isn't in-person work. From a report: "We will support however they want to gather," Houston said in a new interview with The Verge. "But we're finding that these retreats and off-sites and things like that are often a lot more effective than asking people to commute." Houston said other business leaders are making the wrong move by forcing employees back to the of
  
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• Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report For 2024 Q1

  17-04-2024 16:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Cloudflare, in a blog post: Key insights from the first quarter of 2024 include:1. 2024 started with a bang. Cloudflare's defense systems automatically mitigated 4.5 million DDoS attacks during the first quarter -- representing a 50% year-over-year (YoY) increase.
  2. DNS-based DDoS attacks increased by 80% YoY and remain the most prominent attack vector.
  3. DDoS attacks on Sweden surged by 466% after its acceptance to the NATO alliance, mirroring the pattern observed during Finland's NATO access
  
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• Broadcom Throws VMware Customers On Perpetual Licenses a Lifeline

  17-04-2024 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: In a Monday post, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan restated his belief that VMware's portfolio was too complex, and too poorly integrated, for the virtualization giant to represent true competition for hyperscale clouds. Broadcom's injection of R&D cash, he insisted, will see VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation suite evolve to become more powerful and easy to operate. He also admitted that customers aren't enjoying the ride. "As we roll out this str
  
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• SEC Targets Its Own Staff's Texting, Nixes WhatsApp On Work Phones

  17-04-2024 12:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  The SEC has blocked third-party messaging apps and texts from employees' work phones, "bringing its own practices closer to the standards it's enforcing for the industry," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The SEC's decision to block disappearing-messaging apps will help improve record-keeping and address potential security vulnerabilities at the agency, which saw one of its social-media accounts compromised earlier this year. It follows about $3 billion in fines imposed on financial firms to
  
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• NASA Confirms That Debris From ISS Crashed Into Florida Home

  17-04-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NASA has confirmed that a piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station. NBC News reports: The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago. The pallet, packed with aging batteries, was supposed to burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, but a piece survived -- the piece that smashed into a house in Naples, Florida, on
  
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• Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract With Israel's Government

  17-04-2024 05:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company's $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office in Sunnyvale and the 10th floor commons of Google's New York office. The sit-in will be accompanied by
  
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• State Tax Officials Are Using AI To Go After Wealthy Payers

  17-04-2024 03:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  State tax collectors, particularly in New York, have intensified their audit efforts on high earners, leveraging artificial intelligence to compensate for a reduced number of auditors. CNBC reports: In New York, the tax department reported 771,000 audits in 2022 (the latest year available), up 56% from the previous year, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance. At the same time, the number of auditors in New York declined by 5% to under 200 due to tight budgets. So how is New Y
  
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• Framework's Software and Firmware Have Been a Mess

  17-04-2024 03:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Framework, the company known for designing and selling upgradeable, modular laptops, has struggled with providing up-to-date software for its products. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham spoke with CEO Nirav Patel to discuss how the company is working on fixing these issues. Longtime Slashdot reader snikulin shares the report: Driver bundles remain un-updated for years after their initial release. BIOS updates go through long and confusing beta processes, keeping users from getting feature improve
  
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• 'Crescendo' Method Can Jailbreak LLMs Using Seemingly Benign Prompts

  17-04-2024 02:20 via slashdot.org
  
  spatwei shares a report from SC Magazine: Microsoft has discovered a new method to jailbreak large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) tools and shared its ongoing efforts to improve LLM safety and security in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft first revealed the "Crescendo" LLM jailbreak method in a paper published April 2, which describes how an attacker could send a series of seemingly benign prompts to gradually lead a chatbot, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Meta's Lla
  
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• ISPs Can Charge Extra For Fast Gaming Under FCC's Internet Rules, Critics Say

  17-04-2024 01:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet service providers would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The rules mirror the ones imposed by the FCC during the Obama era and repealed during Trump's p
  
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• Apple's iOS 18 AI Will Be On-Device Preserving Privacy, and Not Server-Side

  17-04-2024 00:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's initial set of AI-related features in iOS 18 "will work entirely on device," and won't connect to cloud services. AppleInsider reports: In practice, these AI features would be able to function without an internet connection or any form of cloud-based processing. AppleInsider has received information from individuals familiar with the matter that suggest the report's claims are accurate. Apple is working on an in-house large language model, or LLM, kn
  
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• Judge Refuses To Ctrl-Z Divorce Order Made By a Misclick

  17-04-2024 00:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Richard Currie reports via The Register: A simple misclick at a London law firm led to a surprise divorce for an unsuspecting couple. An employee at Vardags, self-described specialists in high-net-worth marital breakdowns, opened the wrong file when applying for a divorce in His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) online portal. With a click more potent than Cupid's arrow, the solicitor "issued a final order of divorce in proceedings between Mrs Williams, the applicant wife, and Mr Wi
  
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• A New Generation Is Uncovering the Tiny Doodles Left By Engineers On Old Microchips

  16-04-2024 23:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: An owl. A sharky looking bullet. The Hindu deity Ganesh. The Yin and Yang sign. All painstakingly selected and etched onto a microchip that measures about an inch square. Each microscopic silicon doodle was the handiwork of engineers at Qualcomm Incorporated, a San Diego-based company that creates wireless technology-related products and services. The engineers slipped the drawings into Qualcomm's Q1650 data decoder with care not to disturb any of th
  
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• Creating Sexually Explicit Deepfake Images To Be Made Offense in UK

  16-04-2024 22:41 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Creating a sexually explicit "deepfake" image is to be made an offence under a new law in the UK, the Ministry of Justice has announced. The Guardian: Under the legislation, anyone who creates such an image without consent will face a criminal record and an unlimited fine. They could also face jail if the image is shared more widely. The creation of a deepfake image will be an offence regardless of whether the creator intended to share it, the department said. The Online Safety Act, introduced l
  
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