ICT news

• Intel Core i9-9900F Leak: Locked and Not Loaded

  18-03-2019 17:38
  The Intel Core i9-9900F is the third confirmed variant of the original Intel Core i9-9900K.
  
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• California Is Grappling With a Growing Problem: Too Much Solar

  23-04-2024 05:33 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: In sunny California, solar panels are everywhere. They sit in dry, desert landscapes in the Central Valley and are scattered over rooftops in Los Angeles's urban center. By last count, the state had nearly 47 gigawatts of solar power installed -- enough to power 13.9 million homes and provide over a quarter of the Golden State's electricity. But now, the state and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so muc
  
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• Pareto's Economic Theories Used To Find the Best Mario Kart 8 Racer

  23-04-2024 03:25 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz, PhD, applied Vilfredo Pareto's (the early 20th-century Italian economist) theories to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to determine the best racer combinations. "When you break down the build options (including driver stats and various vehicle details) in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, there are over 700,000 possible combinations," notes Engadget. "But once you eliminate duplicates that differ only in appearance, you can narrow it down to 'only' 25,704 possibilities." From the report
  
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• Apple Acquires Datakalab, a French Startup Behind AI and Computer Vision Tech

  23-04-2024 02:45 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  According to French business magazine Challenges, Apple has acquired Datakalab -- a Paris-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence compression and computer vision technology. 9to5Mac reports: Datakalab described itself as "experts in low power, runtime efficient, and deep learning algorithms" that work on device. On its LinkedIn page, Datakalab highlights "industry leading compression and adaptation to deploy embedded computer vision that is fast, cost-effective and precise." Prior
  
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• Huawei Wants To Take Homegrown HarmonyOS Phone Platform Worldwide

  23-04-2024 02:02 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last
  
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• Gaming Giant Embracer Group Is Splitting Into Three Companies

  23-04-2024 01:20 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group announced plans on Monday to split itself into three distinct games and entertainment companies: Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends. These will be separate, publicly listed companies, according to Embracer, which says the move will allow "each entity to better focus on their respective core strategies and offer more differentiated and distinct equity stories for ex
  
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• EU Opens Probe of TikTok Lite, Citing Concerns About Addictive Design

  23-04-2024 00:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The European Union has opened a second formal investigation into TikTok under its Digital Services Act (DSA), an online governance and content moderation framework. The investigation centers around TikTok Lite's "Task and Reward" feature that may harm mental health, especially among minors, by promoting addictive behavior. TechCrunch reports: The Commission also said it's minded to impose interim measures that could force the company to suspend access to the TikTok Lite app in the EU while it in
  
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• Home Assistant Has a New Foundation, Goal To Become a Consumer Brand

  23-04-2024 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It
  
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• Europe Baked in 'Extreme Heat Stress' Pushing Temperatures To Record Highs

  22-04-2024 23:21 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Scorching weather has baked Europe in more days of "extreme heat stress" than its scientists have ever seen. The Guardian: Heat-trapping pollutants that clog the atmosphere helped push temperatures in Europe last year to the highest or second-highest levels ever recorded, according to the EU's Earth-watching service Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Europeans are suffering with unprecedented heat during the day and are stressed by uncomfortable warmth at night. The deat
  
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• Study: Alphabetical Order of Surnames May Affect Grading

  22-04-2024 22:41 via science.slashdot.org
  
  AmiMoJo writes: Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade. An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students' submissions in Canvas -- the most widely used online learning management system -- which is based on a
  
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• Amazon Ends California Drone Deliveries

  22-04-2024 22:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon confirmed it is ending Prime Air drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California. The Central California town of 3,500 was the company's second U.S. drone delivery site, after College Station, Texas. Operations were announced in June 2022. From a report: The retail giant is not offering details around the setback, only noting, "We'll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods. We want to thank
  
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• Meta Opens Quest OS To Third Parties, Including ASUS and Lenovo

  22-04-2024 21:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  In a huge move for the mixed reality industry, Meta announced today that it's opening the Quest's operating system to third-party companies, allowing them to build headsets of their own. From a report: Think of it like moving the Quest's ecosystem from an Apple model, where one company builds both the hardware and software, to more of a hardware free-for-all like Android. The Quest OS is being rebranded to "Meta Horizon OS," and at this point it seems to have found two early adopters. ASUS's Rep
  
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• Chinese Flying Taxi Sector Claims Global Lead Thanks To Regulatory Support

  22-04-2024 20:41 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  A Shanghai flying taxi company says that China's "low altitude" industry is edging ahead of western rivals, thanks to more supportive regulators, technological breakthroughs and cut-throat competition in the Chinese logistics sector. From a report: The total market created by electric vertical take-off and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft is forecast to be worth $1.5tn a year by 2040 in a base-case assessment by Morgan Stanley analysts, with potential customers across airlines, logistics, emergency s
  
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• Europol Becomes Latest Law Enforcement Group To Plead With Big Tech To Ditch E2EE

  22-04-2024 20:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Yet another international cop shop has come out swinging against end-to-end encryption - this time it's Europol which is urging an end to implementation of the tech for fear police investigations will be hampered by protected DMs. The Register: In a joint declaration of European police chiefs published over the weekend, Europol said it needs lawful access to private messages, and said tech companies need to be able to scan them (ostensibly impossible with E2EE implemented) to protect users. With
  
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• Apple Reportedly Stops Production of FineWoven Accessories

  22-04-2024 19:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to reliable Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." From a report: In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Apple introduced FineWoven, a soft fabric material, last year. The company claimed that the material is made of 6
  
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• Biden Marks Earth Day by Announcing $7 Billion in Solar Power Grants

  22-04-2024 18:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  President Joe Biden travels to Triangle, Virginia, Monday to mark Earth Day, where he'll unveil $7 billion in grant funding for solar power under the Inflation Reduction Act and announce new steps to stand up his administration's American Climate Corps -- a program popular with youth climate groups. From a report: The announcements come days after the Biden administration made several significant conservation announcements, including barring oil drilling on nearly half of the national petroleum
  
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• AI Needs So Much Electricity That Tech Companies Are Getting Into Energy Business

  22-04-2024 18:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: To accommodate tech companies' pivots to artificial intelligence, tech companies are increasingly investing in ways to power AI's immense electricity needs. Most recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invested in Exowatt, a company using solar power to feed data centers, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's on the heals of OpenAI partner, Microsoft, working on getting approval for nuclear energy to help power its AI operations. Last year Amazon, which is a m
  
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• Russian Court Sentences Meta Spokesperson To Six Years in Absentia, Calls Meta 'Extremist Organisation'

  22-04-2024 17:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A military court in Moscow on Monday sentenced Meta spokesperson Andy Stone to six years in prison for "publicly defending terrorism," a verdict handed down in absentia, RIA news agency reported. Reuters: Meta itself is designated an extremist organisation in Russia and its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms have been banned in the country since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
  [...] Russia's interior ministry opened a criminal investigation into Stone late last year, without disclos
  
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• Marketing Cancer Drugs To Physicians Increases Prescribing Without Improving Mortality

  22-04-2024 16:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: Physicians commonly receive marketing-related transfers from drug firms. We examine the impact of these relationships on the prescribing of physician-administered cancer drugs in Medicare. We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is received, with the increase beginning sharply in the month of payment and fading out within a year. A marketing payment also leads physicians to beg
  
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• North Koreans Secretly Animated Amazon and Max Shows, Researchers Say

  22-04-2024 16:01 via it.slashdot.org
  
  North Korean animators have been secretly working on major international TV shows, including an Amazon superhero series and an upcoming HBO Max children's anime, according to a report by cybersecurity researchers. The findings, detailed in a report by the Stimson Center think tank's 38 North Project and Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provide a glimpse into how North Korea can use skilled IT workers to raise funds for its heavily sanctioned regime.
  Researcher Nick Roy discovered a misconfig
  
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• How CP/M Launched the Next 50 Years of Operating Systems

  22-04-2024 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  50 years ago this week, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall "demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California," according to a blog post from Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. It tells the story of "how his company, Digital Research Inc., established CP/M as an industry standard and its subsequent loss to a version from Microsoft that copied the look and feel of the DRI software."Kildall was a CS instructor and later associ
  
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• What Happened After Amazon Electrified Its Delivery Fleet?

  22-04-2024 09:44 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Bloomberg looks at America's biggest operator of private electrical vehicle charging infrastructure: Amazon. "In a little more than two years, Amazon has installed more than 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the U.S." — and had Rivian build 13,500 custom electric delivery vans.Amazon has a long way to go. The Seattle-based company says its operations emitted about 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2022, up by almost 40% since Jeff Bezos's 2019 vow that his
  
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• Ex-White House Cyber Policy Director: Microsoft is a National Security Risk

  22-04-2024 06:59 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  This week the Register spoke to former senior White House cyber policy director A.J. Grotto — who complained it was hard to get even slight concessions from Microsoft:
  "If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago ... [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said. "As a result, it was really hard for agencies to identify their exposure to the SolarWinds breach." Grotto told us Microsoft had to b
  
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• Startup is Building the World's Largest Ocean-Based Carbon Plant - and It's Scalable

  22-04-2024 04:09 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
  On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen — a much-hyped clean fuel.
  The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the start
  
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• The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Just Sent Its Last Message Home

  22-04-2024 00:25 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Two months ago the team behind NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter released a video reflecting on its historic explorations of Mars, flying 10.5 miles (17.0 kilometers) in 72 different flights over three years. It was the team's way of saying goodbye, according to NASA's video.
  And this week, LiveScience reports, Ingenuity answered back:On April 16, Ingenuity beamed back its final signal to Earth, which included the remaining data it had stored in its memory bank and information about its final flight.
  
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• GPT-4 Can Exploit Real Vulnerabilities By Reading Security Advisories

  21-04-2024 23:05 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader tippen shared this report from the Register:AI agents, which combine large language models with automation software, can successfully exploit real world security vulnerabilities by reading security advisories, academics have claimed.
  In a newly released paper, four University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) computer scientists — Richard Fang, Rohan Bindu, Akul Gupta, and Daniel Kang — report that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM) can autonomously
  
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• Is Rivos Building an RISC-V AI Chip?

  21-04-2024 22:05 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Remember when Apple filed a lawsuit against chip startup Rivos (saying that in one year Rivos hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology)? Apple settled that suit in February.
  And now Tuesday Rivos announced that it raised $250 million, according to Reuters, "in a funding round that will enable it to manufacture its first server chip geared for artificial intelligence," combining a CPU with an AI-accelerating component optimized for LLMs and data a
  
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• Lying to Investors? Co-Founder of Startup 'HeadSpin' Gets 18-Month Prison Sentence for Fraud

  21-04-2024 21:05 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The co-founder of Silicon Valley-based software testing startup HeadSpin was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison and a $1 million fine, reports SFGate — for defrauding investors.
  Lachwani pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and a count of securities fraud in April 2023, after federal prosecutors accused him of, for years, lying to investors about HeadSpin's finances to raise more money. HeadSpin, founded in 2015, grew to a $1.1 billion valuation by 2020 with over $115 million in
  
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• Should Automakers Feel Threatened by China's Exports of Electric Cars?

  21-04-2024 19:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Los Angeles Times reports that the U.S.-China rivalry "has a new flashpoint in the battle for technology supremacy: electric cars."
  "So far, the U.S. is losing."Last year, China became the world's foremost auto exporter, according to the China Passenger Car Assn., surpassing Japan with more than 5 million sales overseas. New energy vehicles accounted for about 25% of those exports, and more than half of those were created by Chinese brands, a shift from the traditional assembly role China ha
  
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• LXQt 2.0 Released: Lightweight Desktop is Almost Wayland Compatible

  21-04-2024 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This week saw the release of the LXQt 2.0 desktop environment, reports 9to5Linux. And besides bringing Qt 6 support (and a new default application menu), it also brings support for the Wayland display protocol to more components:
  The LXQt development is confident that the next major release, LXQt 2.1, will be fully Wayland compatible. The components that need to be ported to Wayland include ScreenGrab, LXQt Global Shortcuts, LXQt Panel's task-bar and keyboard indicator, some input settings, and
  
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