ICT news

• 46 States Ask Appeals Court To Reinstate Facebook Lawsuit

  20-09-2022 23:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  A big group of U.S. states, led by New York, has argued to an appeals court that it should reinstate an antitrust lawsuit against Meta's Facebook because of ongoing harm from the company's actions and because the states had not waited too long to file their complaint. From a report: Barbara Underwood, solicitor general of New York which led the group that consists of 46 states, Guam and District of Columbia, said that it was wrong to treat states like a class action and put a limit on when they
  
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• Advocacy Group Asks FCC To Probe Efficacy of Wireless Industry's Voluntary Phone Unlocking Commitments

  20-09-2022 22:40 via news.slashdot.org
  A public interest group has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to look at whether the wireless industry's voluntary phone unlocking commitments are even effective, claiming the practice harms competition. From a report: The advocacy group, Public Knowledge, met with FCC staffers last week and filed the comment shortly afterwards, arguing the practice of locking phones to a network makes it "more difficult for consumers to change carriers," reduces the number of devices available o
  
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• Amazon's $1.7 Billion Proposed Purchase of Roomba Maker Under FTC Investigation

  20-09-2022 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Federal antitrust enforcers are investigating Amazon proposal to buy Roomba maker iRobot, according to a securities filing. WSJ: The Federal Trade Commission this week formally requested documents from both companies explaining the proposed $1.7 billion deal's purpose and rationale, iRobot disclosed on Tuesday. The FTC's review is the latest investigation involving Amazon. The agency also is examining Amazon's $3.9 billion deal to buy 1Life Healthcare, which operates One Medical primary-care cli
  
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• Apple To Hike App Store Prices Across Europe and Some Parts of Asia Next Month

  20-09-2022 21:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple says it will increase App Store prices across Europe and in some Asian markets next month as currencies weaken against the strong US dollar. The price increases will effect both in-app purchases and regular apps on the App Store starting on October 5th. From a report: All countries using the Euro, Sweden, South Korea, Chile, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Japan will be affected by the price hikes. All Euro markets, except Montenegro, will see the base $0.99 app pricing move to $1.
  
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• Crypto Market Maker Wintermute Loses $160 Million in DeFi Hack

  20-09-2022 20:41 via slashdot.org
  Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, has lost about $160 million in a hack, a top executive said Tuesday, becoming the latest firm in the industry to suffer a breach. From a report: Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm's decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren't affected. He said that Wintermute -- which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Cap
  
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• Microsoft Rolls Out Windows 11 2022 Update

  20-09-2022 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft on Tuesday said it's starting to release the first major update to Windows 11, the current version of its PC operating system. The company said the update is aimed at making PCs easier and safer to use and improve productivity. Some excerpts detailing new features from Windows blog: Windows 11 brought a sense of ease to the PC, with an intuitive design people love. We're building on that foundation with new features to ensure the content and information you need is always at your finge
  
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• Microsoft Commits To Updating Windows 11 Once Per Year, and Also All the Time

  20-09-2022 19:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: When ArsTechnica reviewed Windows 11 last fall, one of its biggest concerns was that it would need to wait until the fall of 2022 to see changes or improvements to its new -- and sometimes rough -- user interface. Nearly a year later, it's become abundantly clear that Microsoft isn't holding back changes and new apps for the operating system's yearly feature update. One notable smattering of additions was released back in February alongside a commitment to "c
  
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• Academic Publishers Turn To AI Software To Catch Bad Scientists Doctoring Data

  20-09-2022 18:42 via tech.slashdot.org
  Shady scientists trying to publish bad research may want to think twice as academic publishers are increasingly using AI software to automatically spot signs of data tampering. The Register: Duplications of images, where the same picture of a cluster of cells, for example, is copied, flipped, rotated, shifted, or cropped is, unfortunately, quite common. In cases where the errors aren't accidental, the doctored images are created to look as if the researchers have more data and conducted more exp
  
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• Nvidia Announces Next-Gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs

  20-09-2022 18:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Nvidia is officially announcing its RTX 40-series GPUs today. After months of rumors and some recent teasing from Nvidia, the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are now both official. The RTX 4090 arrives on October 12th priced at $1,599, with the RTX 4080 priced starting at $899 and available in November. Both are powered by Nvidia's next-gen Ada Lovelace architecture. From a report: The RTX 4090 is the top-end card for the Lovelace generation. It will ship with a massive 24GB of GDDR6X memory. Nvidia claim
  
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• A Gnarly New Theory About Saturn's Rings

  20-09-2022 17:24 via science.slashdot.org
  Saturn has quite the collection of moons, more than any other planet in the solar system. There's Enceladus, blanketed in ice, with a briny ocean beneath its surface. There's Iapetus, half of which is dusty and dark, and the other shiny and bright. There are Hyperion, a rocky oval that bears a striking resemblance to a sea sponge, and Pan, tiny and shaped just like a cheese ravioli. But one moon might be missing. From a report: According to a new study, Saturn once had yet another moon, about th
  
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• Apple Executive Responds To Annoying iOS 16 Copy and Paste Prompt: 'Absolutely Not Expected Behavior'

  20-09-2022 16:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple has responded to user complaints regarding an annoying pop-up in iOS 16 that asks for user permission if an app wants to access the clipboard to paste text, images, and more. From a report: The new prompt was added to iOS 16 as a privacy measure for users, requiring that apps ask for permission to access the clipboard, which may have sensitive data. The prompt, however, has become an annoyance for users as they install iOS 16, as it constantly asks for permission whenever they wish to past
  
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• Indonesia Parliament Passes Long-Awaited Data Protection Bill

  20-09-2022 16:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  Indonesia's parliament passed into law on Tuesday a personal data protection bill that includes corporate fines and up to six years imprisonment for those found to have mishandled data in the world's fourth most populous country. From a report: The bill's passage comes after a series of data leaks and probes into alleged breaches at government firms and institutions in Indonesia, from a state insurer, telecoms company and public utility to a contact-tracing COVID-19 app that revealed President J
  
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• OpenAI Begins Allowing Users To Edit Faces With DALL-E 2

  20-09-2022 15:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people's faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of prominent celebrities and public figures. OpenAI claims that improvements to its safe
  
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• Tech Workers Paying To Get Taller

  20-09-2022 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yeste
  
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• Last Floppy-Disk Seller Says Airlines Still Order the Old Tech

  20-09-2022 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Tom Persky, the founder of floppydisk.com who claims to be the "last man standing in the floppy disk business," said that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers. He talked about this in the new book "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium" by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar. Insider reports: "My biggest customers -- and the place where most of the money comes from -- are the industrial users," Persky said, in an interview from the book published online in
  
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• Earth Has 20 Quadrillion Ants, Study Says

  20-09-2022 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum -- 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion -- reveals ants' astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientis
  
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• When AI Asks Dumb Questions, It Gets Smart Fast

  20-09-2022 04:02 via news.slashdot.org
  sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh -- and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI's accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design pr
  
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• Children May Be Losing the Equivalent of One Night's Sleep a Week From Social Media Use, Study Suggests

  20-09-2022 03:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  Children under 12 may be losing the equivalent of one night's sleep every week due to excessive social media use, a new study suggests. Insider reports: Almost 70% of the 60 children under 12 surveyed by De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, said they used social media for four hours a day or more. Two thirds said they used social media apps in the two hours before going to bed. The study also found that 12.5% of the children surveyed were waking up in the night to check their notifications.P
  
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• NYC to Offer Free Broadband to 300,000 Public Housing Residents

  20-09-2022 02:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  New York City is partnering with Charter and Altice to provide free high-speed internet and basic cable TV service to about 300,000 residents of public housing. Bloomberg reports: Called "Big Apple Connect," the program aims to bridge the digital divide between wealthier residents and lower-income people who lack the tools necessary for remote learning, access to health care and job opportunities, city officials said. An estimated 30% to 40% of people who live in buildings run by the New York Ci
  
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• Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome Enhanced Spellcheck Feature Exposes Passwords

  20-09-2022 02:02 via it.slashdot.org
  Recent research from the otto-js Research Team has uncovered that data that is being checked by both Microsoft Editor and the enhanced spellcheck setting within Google Chrome is being sent to Microsoft and Google respectively. This data can include usernames, emails, DOB, SSN, and basically anything that is typed into a text box that is checked by these features. Neowin reports: As an additional note, even passwords can be sent by these features, but only when a 'Show Password' button is pressed
  
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• Adobe-Figma Deal Likely To Attract Antitrust Scrutiny

  20-09-2022 01:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Some users of Figma's design software reacted with dismay on Thursday when they found out the company was going to be acquired by Adobe, the unloved giant in the space. Other observers immediately concluded that the acquisition looks downright illegal under antitrust laws.Why it matters: The Biden administration is on the record as wanting to beef up antitrust enforcement. The Figma deal, at $20 billion, is certainly large enough to grab the attent
  
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• Linus Torvalds: Rust Will Go Into Linux 6.1

  20-09-2022 00:40 via linux.slashdot.org
  slack_justyb writes: As previously indicated on Slashdot, Rust was slated to be coming to the Linux Kernel sometime in the 6.x version. Well wonder no longer on which version of kernel 6.x will have the first bits of Rust officially in the kernel, as Linus has confirmed that 6.1 will be the first with the new NVMe kernel drivers being in Rust. The first version non-production ready code for the NVMe Rust based kernel drivers were already producing performance comparable to C code. So the final d
  
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• Gmail Launches Pilot To Keep Campaign Emails Out of Spam

  20-09-2022 00:00 via politics.slashdot.org
  Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users' spam folders this week, the company told Axios. From the report: Google asked the Federal Election Commission in June if a program that would let campaigns emails bypass spam filters, instead giving users the option to move them to spam first, would be legal under campaign finance laws. Despite hundreds of negative comments submitted to the FEC arguing against it, the FEC approved the program in Augu
  
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