ICT news

• NFT Trading Volumes Collapse 97% From January Peak

  28-09-2022 23:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  Trading volumes in nonfungible tokens -- digital art and collectibles recorded on blockchains -- have tumbled 97% from a record high in January this year. From a report: They slid to just $466 million in September from $17 billion at the start of 2022, according to data from Dune Analytics. The fading NFT mania is part of a wider, $2 trillion wipeout in the crypto sector as rapidly tightening monetary policy starves speculative assets of investment flows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• North Korea Launches Mass Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign

  28-09-2022 22:41 via science.slashdot.org
  North Korea has begun a mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign in its border areas, according to South Korea's spy agency, becoming one of the world's final countries to embark on such a national rollout. From a report: North Korea and Eritrea, in east Africa, were the only remaining countries that hadn't started widespread vaccination distribution, the World Health Organization has said. After rejecting millions of doses from other countries last year, North Korea admitted to its first nationwide C
  
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• Adobe Outlines Figma Feature Ideas, Commits to Keeping Free Tier

  28-09-2022 22:00 via slashdot.org
  Adobe plans to add technology from its creative software portfolio to Figma without tweaking pricing or simplicity after its acquisition, seeking to ease concerns among loyal users that the deal may significantly change the design app. From a report: Photo, video and illustration editing will likely be implemented into the software design app after the acquisition closes, as well as the ability to link projects from Adobe products such as Photoshop or Premiere, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott
  
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• Wall Street Hit With $2 Billion of Fines in WhatsApp Probe

  28-09-2022 21:22 via tech.slashdot.org
  US regulators reached settlements with a dozen banks in a sprawling probe into how global financial firms failed to monitor employees' communications on unauthorized messaging apps, bringing total penalties in the matter to more than $2 billion. From a report: The Securities and Exchange Commission announced $1.1 billion in fines and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission disclosed $710 million in penalties in separate statements Tuesday. Those levies -- against firms including Bank of America
  
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• UK Online Safety Bill Threatens Security, WhatsApp Chief Warns

  28-09-2022 20:40 via news.slashdot.org
  The head of WhatsApp has warned UK ministers that moves to undermine encryption in a relaunched online safety bill would threaten the security of the government's own communications and embolden authoritarian regimes. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Will Cathcart, who runs the Meta-owned messaging app, insisted that alternative techniques were available to protect children using WhatsApp, without having to abandon the underlying security technology that safeguards its mo
  
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• For China's Auto Market, Electric Isn't the Future. It's the Present.

  28-09-2022 20:01 via slashdot.org
  More electric cars will be sold in China this year than in the rest of the world combined, as its domestic market accelerates ahead of the global competition. From a report: This year, a quarter of all new cars purchased in China will be an all-electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid. By some estimates, more than 300 Chinese companies are making E.V.s, ranging from discount offerings below $5,000 to high-end models that rival Tesla and German automakers. There are roughly four million charging unit
  
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• Cloudflare Wants To Replace CAPTCHAs With Turnstile

  28-09-2022 19:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  Ahead of its Connect conference in October, Cloudflare this week announced an ambitious new project called Turnstile, which seeks to do away with the CAPTCHAs used throughout the web to verify people are who they say they are. From a report: Available to site owners at no charge, Cloudflare customers or no, Turnstile chooses from a rotating suite of "browser challenges" to check that visitors to a webpage aren't, in fact, bots. CAPTCHAs, the challenge-response tests most of us have encountered w
  
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• CISA Releases Six Industrial Control Systems Advisories

  28-09-2022 18:52 via us-cert.cisa.gov
  Original release date: September 28, 2022 | Last revised: September 29, 2022
  CISA has released six (6) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on September 29, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the newly released ICS advisory for technical details and mitigations: ICSA-22-272-01 Hitachi Energy MicroSCADA Pro X SYS600_8DBD000106  ICSA-
  
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• Newsom Signs California Pay Transparency Bill SB 1162

  28-09-2022 18:40 via news.slashdot.org
  More pay transparency is coming to California. The Golden State is joining New York City, Colorado, and Washington in requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job ads. From a report: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1162 into law on Tuesday, according to statements from the California Legislative Women's Caucus and the TechEquity Collaborative. Under the law, employers with 15 or more workers will be required to include pay ranges in job postings, and those with 100 or more employees or
  
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• Useless Meetings Waste Time and $100 Million a Year for Big Companies

  28-09-2022 17:50 via slashdot.org
  Unnecessary meetings are a $100 million mistake at big companies, according to a new survey that shows workers probably don't need to be in nearly a third of the appointments they attend. From a report: The survey, conducted over the summer by Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asked 632 employees across 20 industries to study their weekly calendars and gauge how much time they actually spent in mee
  
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• OpenAI Will Remove Its Waitlist for DALL-E, Giving Anyone Immediate Access

  28-09-2022 17:07 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report:Since the research lab OpenAI debuted the latest version of DALL-E in April, the AI has dazzled the public, attracting digital artists, graphic designers, early adopters, and anyone in search of online distraction. The ability to create original, sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired images from any spur-of-the-moment phrase, like a conversational Photoshop, has startled even jaded internet users with how quickly AI has progressed. Five months later, 1
  
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• Apple Removes Russia's Largest Social Network From the App Store

  28-09-2022 16:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down.
  "These apps are bein
  
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• Alzheimer's Drug Slows Cognitive Decline in Key Study

  28-09-2022 16:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai said this week that a drug they are developing for Alzheimer's disease had slowed the rate of cognitive decline in a large late-stage clinical trial. From a report: The strong results boost the drug's chances of winning approval and offer renewed hope for a class of Alzheimer's drugs that have repeatedly failed or generated mixed results. The positive data also offer Biogen a second chance after the company's disastrous rollout of another Alzheimer's
  
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• Better Than JPEG? Researcher Discovers That Stable Diffusion Can Compress Images

  28-09-2022 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Buhlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats. Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying
  
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• Small Dongle Brings the HDD Clicking Back To SSDs In Retro PCs

  28-09-2022 12:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader root_42 writes: Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One "problem" with retro computing is that we replace those disks with compact flash, SD cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances, which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It's called the HDD Click
  
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• Germany To Keep 2 of Its 3 Nuclear Plants Running Into April

  28-09-2022 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Germany's government plans to keep two of the country's three remaining nuclear power plants running until mid-April to help prevent a potential winter energy shortage, the economy and energy minister said Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: The announcement by Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck means the government has officially, albeit temporarily, reversed Germany's long-held plan to shut shut down its nuclear plants by the end of the year. Habeck said the decision to keep operatin
  
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• Room-Temperature Superconductivity Study Retracted

  28-09-2022 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday th
  
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• All 50 States Get Green Light To Build EV Charging Stations

  28-09-2022 04:02 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Transportation Department on Tuesday said it approved electric vehicle charging station plans for all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico covering roughly 75,000 miles of highways. CNBC reports: Earlier this year, the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years along interstate highways as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. Under the plan, entitled the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, states provid
  
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• Tim Cook: 'No Good Excuse' For Lack of Women In Tech

  28-09-2022 03:25 via apple.slashdot.org
  AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still "not enough women at the table" at the world's tech firms -- including his own. He said there were "no good excuses" for the lack of women in the sector. Apple has just launched its founders' development program for female founders and app creators in the UK. "I think the the essence of technology and its effect on humanity depends upon women being at the table," Mr Cook says. "Technology's a great thing th
  
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• The Latest iPadOS 16 Beta Brings Stage Manager To Older iPad Pro Models

  28-09-2022 02:45 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple is bringing Stage Manager, a new multitasking system exclusive to iPads with the M1 chip, to a number of older devices. Engadget reports: Probably the biggest change Apple announced with iPadOS 16 earlier this year is Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad. That feature also works on an external display, the first time that iPads could do anything besides mirror their screen on a monitor. Unfortunately, the feature was limited
  
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• Cloudflare Takes Aim At AWS With Promise of $1.25 Billion To Startups That Use Its Own Platform

  28-09-2022 02:02 via developers.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Cloudflare, the security, performance and reliability company that went public three years ago, said this morning that it will help connect startups that use its serverless computing platform to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds. It's a smart, splashy incentive to entice more startups to use the now five-year-old product, which, according to Cloudfl
  
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• Oracle Pays $23 Million To SEC To Settle Bribery Charges

  28-09-2022 01:40 via developers.slashdot.org
  Oracle has paid $23 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to settle corruption charges that subsidiaries in Turkey, United Arab Emirates and India used "slush funds" to bribe foreign officials to win business. The Register reports: The SEC said on Tuesday that Big Red violated provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) during a three-year period between 2016 and 2019. The cash that was apparently surreptitiously set aside was also spent on paying for foreign officials
  
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• Intel and Samsung Are Getting Ready For 'Slidable' PCs

  28-09-2022 01:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  During Intel's Innovation keynote today, Samsung Display showed off a prototype PC that slides from a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch display. Intel also announced that it's been experimenting with slidable PC form factors. The Verge reports: The prototype device that Samsung Display and Intel have shown off today essentially turns a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch monitor with a flexible display and a sliding mechanism. Intel was quick to demonstrate its new Unison software on this display, which a
  
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• Stock Trade Ban For Congress Is Being Readied For Release In US House

  28-09-2022 00:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Senior House Democrats are poised to introduce long-promised legislation to restrict stock ownership and trading by members of Congress, senior government officials and Supreme Court justices. The bill would apply to the spouses and dependent children of those officials, according to an outline sent to lawmaker offices last week by House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren. The restrictions also cover "commodities, futures, cryptocurrency, and oth
  
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• Microsoft Exchange Online Users Face a Key Security Deadline Saturday

  28-09-2022 00:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft is about to eliminate a method for logging into its Exchange Online email service that is widely considered vulnerable and outdated, but that some businesses still rely upon. From a report: The company has said that as of Oct. 1, it will begin to disable what's known as "basic authentication" for customers that continue to use the system. Basic authentication typically requires only a username and password for login; the system does not play well with multifactor authentication and is
  
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