ICT news

• Rotten Tomatoes Is Launching a Linear Streaming Channel

  18-05-2021 01:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Rotten Tomatoes is continuing on its quest to grow into something substantially bigger than its Tomatometer movie and TV rating scores. From a report: The website -- owned by NBCUniversal's Fandango -- expands its entertainment footprint with the launch of The Rotten Tomatoes Channel, a new over-the-top streaming service that will initially debut on on The Roku Channel. The OTT service will then come to NBCU's Peacock platform and Comcast-owned Xumo, with other distribution deals in the works in
  
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• Nuclear Reactions at Chernobyl Are Spiking in an Inaccessible Chamber

  18-05-2021 00:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Scientists monitoring the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine have seen a surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex. They are now investigating whether the problem will stabilise or require a dangerous and difficult intervention to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction. From a report: The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 brought down walls and sealed off many rooms and corridors. Tonnes of fissile material from the interior of a reactor were strewn thr
  
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• Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China

  17-05-2021 22:46 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has compromised on data security to placate Chinese authorities, the New York Times reported Monday, citing internal company documents and interviews with current and former Apple employees and security experts. An excerpt from the story: At the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandone
  
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• Parler Returns To Apple's App Store

  17-05-2021 22:09 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Parler, a social media app popular with U.S. conservatives, returned to Apple's App Store on Monday, after the iPhone maker dropped it following the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. From a report: Parler also named George Farmer, the company's chief operating officer since March, as its new chief executive and said interim CEO Mark Meckler would be leaving. Apple said last month it would readmit Parler into its iOS App Store, after Parler proposed updates to its app and content moderation
  
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• Amid Public Pressure Audacity Says It Will Not Collect Telemetry Data From Users

  17-05-2021 21:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  After its recent announcement about plans to add telemetry collection prompted backlash, popular audio editor Audacity has announced it won't go ahead with the plan to collect its users' data. BetaNews reports: Audacity's new owner, Muse Group, has bowed to pressure from users and privacy advocates, announcing that the planned telemetry collection will no longer be going ahead. The company is blaming "communication mistakes" and public "misunderstanding" for the negative response to its previous
  
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• Apple and Microsoft's Rivalry Had Cooled. Now It's Back and Getting Testier

  17-05-2021 20:05 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  After collaborating on various projects for several years, the relationship between Microsoft and Apple is getting testier again. From a report: [...] Around the time the PC character reappeared, Microsoft began bad-mouthing Apple to regulators, saying the company's App Store was anti-competitive. The Redmond, Washington, software giant had thrown in its lot with Epic Games, which was suing Apple for booting its Fortnite title from the App Store and accusing the iPhone maker of monopolistic beha
  
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• Apple Music is Getting Lossless and Spatial Audio Support

  17-05-2021 19:03 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Apple Music subscribers will find a big chunk of the catalog sounds better next month: The service is adding support for high-quality, lossless and spatial audio through Dolby Atmos at no additional cost, it said Monday. It'll have 20 million lossless audio songs to start, with 75 million available by the end of 2021. From a report: To try out lossless audio, you should make sure you have the latest version of Apple Music and go to Settings, Music, then Audio Quality. You can choose different re
  
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• Microsoft Teams Launches For Friends and Family With Free All-Day Video Calling

  17-05-2021 18:02 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is launching the personal version of Microsoft Teams today. After previewing the service nearly a year ago, Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use amongst friends and families. From a report: The service itself is almost identical to the Microsoft Teams that businesses use, and it will allow people to chat, video call, and share calendars, locations, and files easily. Microsoft is also continuing to offer everyone free 24-hour video calls that it introduced in the previ
  
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• Microsoft's LinkedIn Accused by Noted China Critic of Censorship

  17-05-2021 17:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  A prominent critic of China based in the U.K. said Microsoft's LinkedIn froze his account and removed content criticizing the country's government, the latest in a series of allegations that the networking website had censored users -- even outside of the Asian nation -- to appease authorities in Beijing. From a report: Peter Humphrey, a British corporate investigator and former journalist who accesses LinkedIn from his home in Surrey, England, said he received notification from LinkedIn last mo
  
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• AT&T Merges Media Assets With Discovery in Blockbuster Deal

  17-05-2021 16:02 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  AT&T has agreed to spin off its media operations in a deal with Discovery that will create a new entertainment company, merging assets ranging from CNN and HBO to HGTV and the Food Network. From a report: AT&T will receive $43 billion in cash, debt securities and debt retention, with AT&T shareholders getting stock representing 71% of the new company, the companies said in a statement Monday. The deal is structured as a tax-advantaged Reverse Morris Trust. Discovery Chief Executive O
  
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• Alexa/Echo Owners Become Part of Amazon's Massive 'Sidewalk' Mesh Network By Default

  17-05-2021 13:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  A tech columnist for Inc. noticed that on June 8th Amazon will finally power up its massive "Sidewalk" mesh network (which uses Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals to communicate between devices). And millions and millions of Amazon customers are all already "opted in" by default:The idea behind it is actually really smart — make it possible for smart home devices to serve as a sort of bridge between your WiFi connection and one another. That way, if your Ring doorbell, for example, isn't l
  
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• Peter Thiel Helps Fund an App That Tells You What to Do

  17-05-2021 09:44 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  "How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person's life?" asks the BBC.
  "A new app is offering you the chance to do just that."When writer Brandon Wong recently couldn't decide what takeaway to order one evening, he asked his followers on social media app NewNew to choose for him. Those that wanted to get involved in the 24-year-old's dinner dilemma paid $5 (£3.50) to vote in a poll, and the majority verdict was that he should go for Korean food, so
  
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• Microsoft Funds a Team with Guido van Rossum to Double the Speed of Python

  17-05-2021 06:14 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  ZDNet reports:
  Guido van Rossum, who created popular programming language Python 30 years ago, has outlined his ambitions to make it twice as fast — addressing a key weakness of Python compared to faster languages like C++.
  Speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston.... In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub, first spotted by The Register, detailin
  
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• US Lawmakers Could Restrict the Use of Non-Compete Agreements

  17-05-2021 03:45 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Politico's technology site Protocol reports that some U.S. lawmakers are getting angry about an unpopular but widespread corporate policy -- the non-compete agreement:
  Non-compete agreements prohibit employees who leave their jobs from taking similar positions with potential competitors for a certain period of time. In the U.S., somewhere between 27.8% and 46.5% of private-sector workers are subject to non-compete agreements, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute study.
  Such agreements a
  
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• Aluminum-Ion Battery Claimed to Charge 60 Times Faster, Hold 3X the Energy

  17-05-2021 01:45 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group "are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells," writes a transportation correspondent for Forbes:They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also las
  
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• The Bizarre Story of the Man Who Invented Ransomware in 1989

  17-05-2021 00:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Slashdot reader quonset writes:To this day no one is sure why he did it, but in 1989 a Harvard-taught evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp mailed out 20,000 floppy discs with malware on them to people around the world. At the time he was doing research into AIDS and the discs had been sent to attendees of the World Health Organization's AIDS conference in Stockholm.Eddy Willems was working for an insurance company in Belgium and his boss asked him to see what was on the disc...
  CNN picks up
  
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• California City Apologizes for Wrongly Accusing Bloggers of Criminal Hacking

  16-05-2021 23:36 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  To settle a lawsuit, the city of Fullerton California "has agreed to pay $350,000 and take back its accusations of criminal computer hacking" against two local bloggers, reports the Orange County Register. The settlement ends what the newspaper calls "a contentious fight over censorship and freedom of speech."The lawsuit accused Joshua Ferguson and David Curlee of stealing computerized personnel files from a Dropbox account to which the city had mistakenly given them access. Some of the files we
  
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• US Considers Law Requiring Companies to Report All Cyberattacks

  16-05-2021 22:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  The Colonial Pipeline cyberattack has spurred new efforts in the U.S. Congress "to require critical companies to tell the government when they've been hacked." Politico reports:Even leading Republicans are expressing support for regulations after this week's chaos — a sharp change from past high-profile efforts that failed due to GOP opposition. The swift reaction from lawmakers reflects the disruptive impact of the ransomware attack on Colonial...
  The vast majority of private companies do
  
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• Improvements Finally Made in How We Name Asteroids

  16-05-2021 21:38 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:For a number of years the administrative process for giving asteroids names has had a worsening logjam. Important or "interesting" bodies (such as `Oumuamua, the first definitely interstellar object identified) would still get names rapidly assigned, but in the background myriads of unspectacular objects would persist with "names" based on their discovery date like "1981 GD1". Which is adequate for managing databases, but less than satisfactory for mos
  
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• Huawei Could Eavesdrop on 6.5 Million Dutch Cellphone Users Without their Knowledge

  16-05-2021 20:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  "Chinese technology provider Huawei was recently accused of being able to monitor all calls made using Dutch mobile operator KPN," writes the Conversation. Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares their report:The revelations are from a secret 2010 report made by consultancy firm Capgemini, which KPN commissioned to evaluate the risks of working with Huawei infrastructure. While the full report on the issue has not been made public, journalists reporting on the story have outlined specific conce
  
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• After 35 Years, Classic Shareware Game 'Cap'n Magneto' Finally Fully Resurrected

  16-05-2021 19:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  A newspaper in Austin, Texas shares the story behind a cult-classic videogame, the 1985 Macintosh shareware game "Cap'n Magneto."
  It was the work of Al Evans, who'd "decided to live life to the fullest after suffering severe burn injuries in 1963" at the age of 17.
  Beneath the surface, "Cap'n Magneto" is a product of its creator's own quest to overcome adversity after a terrible car crash — an amalgamation of hard-earned lessons on the value of relationships, being an active participant in
  
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• MITRE Security Tests Reveal Built-in Advantage of First-Gen Antivirus Vendors

  16-05-2021 18:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader storagedude writes: The MITRE cybersecurity product evaluations use adversarial attack techniques instead of basic malware samples, and as a result are the best tests of enterprise security products — particularly in light of dramatic recent attacks on SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline.What's especially interesting is just how well first-generation antivirus vendors like Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro have fared in the MITRE tests. An eSecurity Planet article analyzes the
  
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• How Should a Company Handle a Ransomware Attack?

  16-05-2021 17:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  ITWire reports on how Norwegian firm Volue Technology handled a ransomware attack that began on May 5th:The company has set up a Web page with information about the attack and also links to frequent updates about the status of its systems. There was no obfuscation about the attack, none at all. The company said: "The ransomware attack on Volue Technology ('Powel') was caused by Ryuk, a type of malware usually known for targeting large, public-entity Microsoft Windows systems."
  What is even more
  
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• Zero Day Found for Universal Turing Machine (CVE-2021-32471)

  16-05-2021 16:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  xanthos (Slashdot reader #73,578) writes: Our friends over at The Register are reporting a zero day vulnerability for one of the earliest modern computer architectures.
  Pontus Johnson, a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has published what amounts to a sql injection attack on the 1967 implementation of the simulated Universal Turing Machine (UTM) designed by the late Marvin Minsky. The exploit allow an arbitrary program to be run in place of the intended on
  
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• Wealthy Install Location-Tracking Apps to Establish Proof-of-Residency for Tax Purposes

  16-05-2021 13:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  The New York Times shares the dilemma of Jeff Sheu, managing director of a private equity firm, who is "exactly the type of high earner California does not want to lose. When people in his tax bracket leave, the state is likely to audit them to make sure they really have left."
  But fortunately, there's an app for that:With the May 17 tax filing deadline approaching, people who have moved to another state or are working more remotely need to be extra vigilant with their tax documents. For Mr. She
  
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• Researchers Build Tiny Wireless, Injectable Chips, Visible Only Under a Microscope

  16-05-2021 09:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Implantable miniaturized medical devices that wirelessly transmit data "are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people," writes Columbia University, noting the devices are "widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases."
  Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the university's newest announcement:These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature,
  
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• Study Finds Alarming Levels of 'Forever Chemicals' In US Mothers' Breast Milk

  16-05-2021 06:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes the Guardian:A new study that checked American women's breast milk for PFAS contamination detected the toxic chemical in all 50 samples tested, and at levels nearly 2,000 times higher than the level some public health advocates advise is safe for drinking water. The findings "are cause for concern" and highlight a potential threat to newborns' health, the study's authors say. "The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US, and
  
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• New Spaceport Announced In Nova Scotia - Operational In 2023

  16-05-2021 05:04 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader boudie2 writes:Maritime Launch Services has secured financing it says will allow it to begin construction on a spaceport facility this fall and get its first launch off the ground in 2022. The first Cyclone 4M medium-class launch vehicle would take off in 2023.The company wants to construct a rocket-launching site in Canso, Nova Scotia to send satellites into orbit for use in near-earth imaging, communications and scientific experiments. President and CEO Steve Matier stated the
  
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• Two Satellites Lost after Rocket Lab's Second-Stage Booster Fails to Reach Orbit

  16-05-2021 03:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Space startup Rocket Lab "lost a pair of satellites as the second stage of one of its Electron rockets failed to make it to orbit Saturday," reports CNET:After a successful liftoff from the company's New Zealand launch facility, something went wrong after the first stage booster separated from the smaller second stage carrying two satellites for Earth imaging company BlackSky. A live feed from the second stage showed that after it separated, it appeared to go into an uncontrolled tumble.
  Comment
  
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• How America Will Improve Its Cybersecurity

  16-05-2021 01:14 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Politico writes:President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered a sweeping overhaul of the federal government's approach to cybersecurity, from the software that agencies buy to the security measures that they use to block hackers, as his administration continues grappling with vulnerabilities exposed by a massive digital espionage campaign carried out by the Russian government... Biden's order requires agencies to encrypt their data, update plans for securely using cloud hosting services and enabling
  
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• Analyzing 30 Years of Brain Research Finds No Meaningful Differences Between Male and Female Brains

  15-05-2021 23:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  "As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population."
  Bloomberg follows up:In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so fe
  
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• Pipeline Attacked by Ransomware Has Now Resumed Normal Operations

  15-05-2021 22:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Though halted last week by ransomware, America's largest gasoline pipeline announced Saturday that it's resumed normal operations, reports the Associated Press, "delivering fuel to its markets, including a large swath of the East Coast."Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline had begun the process of restarting the pipeline's operations on Wednesday evening, warning it could take several days for the supply chain to return to normal.
  "Since that time, we have returned the system to normal operations, de
  
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• Report: 65% of Social Media Anti-vax Propaganda Comes From Just 12 People

  15-05-2021 21:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes:Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies
  
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• University Cancels $700,000 in Student Debt for 220 Graduates Affected by the Pandemic

  15-05-2021 20:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Delaware State University -- also known as DSU -- "is cancelling more than $700,000 in student loans for recent graduates hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic," reports CNN:DSU will cancel $730,655 for more than 220 people, the school announced this week...
  "Too many graduates across the country will leave their schools burdened by debt, making it difficult for them to rent an apartment, cover moving costs, or otherwise prepare for their new careers or graduate school," said Antonio Boyle, DSU's Vi
  
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• Is Computer History Also a History of Physical Pains?

  15-05-2021 19:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  "Decades before "Zoom fatigue" broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind," argues Laine Nooney (in a condensed version of a chapter in the 2022 book Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.)
  Slashdot reader em1ly shares its observation that "There was really no precedent in our history of media interaction for what the combination of sitting and looking at a computer monitor did to the human b
  
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• Russia Races to Beat Tom Cruise and NASA With First Movie Filmed in Space

  15-05-2021 18:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Which country will shoot the first movie in outer space? Russia is now "in a race with the United States to claim the achievement," reports NBC News.
  36-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 37-year-old director Klim Shepenko will complete Russia's cosmonaut-training program, ultimately taking two of the three seats aboard the October launch of Russia's Soyuz mission to the International Space Station:The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced Thursday that it had selected its crew to headline
  
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• Three Students Sue Lambda School Alleging False Advertising

  15-05-2021 17:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Lambda School -- incubated at Y Combinator -- raised $130 million in venture funding from several investors including Google Ventures. Its original business model involved six-month virtual computer science courses for $30,000, remembers TechCrunch, "with the option of paying for the courses in installments based on a sliding scale that only kicks in after you land a job that makes at least $50,000."
  But this week three former students "filed lawsuits against the company in California, claiming
  
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• 'How Lies on Social Media Are Inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'

  15-05-2021 16:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  The New York Times reports on misinformation that's further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
  In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas.
  At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundred
  
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• Cloudflare Wants To Kill the CAPTCHA

  15-05-2021 15:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cloudflare is testing out the possibility of security keys replacing one of the most irritating aspects of web browsing: the CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are used to catch out bots that are trawling websites and are often implemented to prevent online services from being abused. "CAPTCHAs are effectively businesses putting friction in front of their users, and as anyone who has managed a high-performing online business will tell you, it's not something you wa
  
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• AI Tool Writes Real Estate Descriptions Without Ever Stepping Inside a Home

  15-05-2021 12:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  A Canadian startup called Listing AI is using AI to quickly churn out computer-generated descriptions of real estate. All users need to do is give it some details about the home, and the AI does the rest. CNN reports: "L O V E L Y Oakland!" the house description began. It went on to give a slew of details about the 1,484 square-foot home -- light-filled, charming, Mediterranean-style, with a yard that "boasts lush front landscaping" -- and finished by describing the "cozy fireplace" and "rustic-
  
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• Australia Breaks Major Record For New Solar Panel Roof Installations

  15-05-2021 09:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Solar panel installations in 2020 were up nearly 30 percent from the year before, breaking its own record for the number of solar panels installed in a year. ScienceAlert reports: The data, compiled by energy efficiency experts and reported in a CSIRO statement, come from Australia's Clean Energy Regulator, a national body tasked with reducing the country's carbon emissions and accelerating its use of clean energy. "Sustained low technology costs, increased work from home arrangements and a shif
  
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• China Lands Its First Rover On Mars

  15-05-2021 07:14 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a L
  
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• Climate Emissions Shrinking the Stratosphere, Scientists Reveal

  15-05-2021 05:30 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Humanity's enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed. The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 meters since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometer by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.The stratosphere extends from abo
  
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• Mammals Can Breathe Through Their Intestines

  15-05-2021 04:02 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when
  
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• Apple Patents a Way To Deliver 3D Content Without 3D Glasses

  15-05-2021 03:25 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has patented the ability to deliver 3D content to devices like the iPhone, iPad and Macs without requiring 3D glasses. From a report: The company recently filed a patent with the heading of "Split-screen driving of electronic device displays." And the tech it describes means that flat screens on smartphones and tablets will be able to show an image in 3D without the viewer having to wear any glasses or VR headset. The idea is that iPhone and iPad screen will be able to display two differen
  
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• A Toshiba Business Unit Says It Has Been Attacked By Hacking Group DarkSide

  15-05-2021 03:03 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  A division of Toshiba said in a statement on Friday that its European business has been hit by a cyberattack by cyber criminal group DarkSide, which is the same group that the U.S. FBI blamed for the Colonial Pipeline attack. According to a Toshiba spokesperson, the attack occurred the evening of May 4. CNBC reports: The Toshiba unit, which sells self-checkout technology and point-of-sale systems to retailers, told CNBC that it has not paid a ransom. "They required money, but we didn't contact t
  
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• TSMC Is Considering a 3nm Foundry In Arizona

  15-05-2021 02:45 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reuters reports that TSMC -- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the chip foundry making advanced processors for Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm -- is beefing up its plans to build factories in Arizona while turning away from an advanced plant in Europe. Last year, TSMC announced that it would invest $10-$12 billion to build a new 5 nm capable foundry near Phoenix, Arizona. According to Reuters' sources, TSMC officials are considering trebl
  
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• 'I Made Doge In Like Two Hours': Dogecoin Creator Says He 'Didn't Consider' Environmental Impact

  15-05-2021 02:02 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  One of the creators of dogecoin has noted that he "didn't consider" the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency, which was initially created as a joke. The Independent reports: The comments from Billy Markus, one of the people who helped create dogecoin in the first place, when it was intended partly as a joke, came in response to a tweet from Elon Musk. Mr Musk had been attempting to clarify his position on cryptocurrency generally, in the wake of his statement about Tesla. "To be clear, I s
  
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• 'Scheme Flooding' Technique May Be Used To Deanonymize You

  15-05-2021 01:25 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  sandbagger shares a report from The Register: FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser. Konstantin Darutkin, senior software engineer at FingerprintJS, said in a blog post that the company has dubbed the privacy vulnerability "scheme flooding." The name refers to abusing custom U
  
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• Confronting Disinformation Spreaders on Twitter Only Makes It Worse, MIT Scientists Say

  15-05-2021 00:45 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious. From a report: Basically, the new thinking is that correcting fake news, disinformation, and horrible tweets at all is bad and makes everything worse. This is a "perverse downstream consequence for debunking," and is the exact title of MIT research published in the '2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.' The core takeaway is that "being c
  
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