ICT news

• The Block CEO Resigns After Failure To Disclose Loans From Bankman-Fried's Alameda

  09-12-2022 23:40 via slashdot.org
  The Block Chief Executive Officer Michael McCaffrey resigned after failing to disclose a series of loans from disgraced former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research. He was the only person with knowledge of the funding at the company. The Block reports: Bobby Moran, The Block's chief revenue officer, will step into the role of CEO, effective immediately, according to a company statement. "No one at The Block had any knowledge of this financial arrangement besides Mike," Moran said in a s
  
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• Why Raspberry Pi's New Hire Caused a Social Media Firestorm

  09-12-2022 23:02 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Joe Bowser is a computer scientist based in Port Moody, British Columbia, who has long loved Raspberry Pis. He uses the low-cost, single-board computers, which were launched in February 2012 by a UK-based company of the same name, for many of his tech projects. Those include linking the Raspberry Pi up to a 3D printer, and using the Pi to run a machine-learning demo. There's one use case that Bowser described as "the most important": using
  
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• FCC Orders Telecoms To Block Scammers Targeting Student Loan Forgiveness Seekers

  09-12-2022 22:21 via yro.slashdot.org
  U.S. telecom providers, under a new FCC order, will have to take "all necessary steps" to block calls from a shady communication company engaged in a mass robocall scam preying on people seeking student loan forgiveness. From a report: The scammer company, called Urth Access, LLC, would reportedly spam users with calls urging them to forfeit their personal information or pay a fee in order to receive up to around $10,000 in student loan debt relief. Many of the scams reportedly referred to the B
  
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• Crypto Exchange Coinbase Asks Users To Switch USDT for USDC

  09-12-2022 21:41 via news.slashdot.org
  Coinbase is waiving the conversion fees for users who wish to switch to a "trusted stablecoin" in a new campaign that highlights the quality of reserves that back Circle-owned USD coin (USDC). From a report: "The events of the past few weeks have put some stablecoins to the test and we've seen a flight to safety," Coinbase said in blog post published Friday morning Asia time. "We believe that USD coin (USDC) is a trusted and reputable stablecoin." Coinbase said starting today it's waiving fees f
  
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• Mars May Have Active Volcanoes, Adding New Promise To Search for Extraterrestrial Life

  09-12-2022 21:01 via science.slashdot.org
  One of the great differences between Mars and Earth involves what's going on beneath the surface. Our planet remains a tectonically and volcanically active world -- witness the current eruptions in Hawaii -- while Mars has been a cold, geologically dead place for the past three billion years. That was the thinking at least. But a new paper in Nature Astronomy challenges that accepted wisdom. Mars, it suggests, may still be geologically active today. Time: The findings are the result of orbital p
  
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• Microsoft Acquires Startup Developing High-Speed Cables for Transmitting Data

  09-12-2022 20:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing "hollow core fiber (HCF)" technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. From a report: Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren't disclosed, will "expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure" and "serve Microsoft's cloud platform and services customers with strict latency and security requirements." HCF cables fundamentally combine optical fiber and coaxial ca
  
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• Amazon Wants To Kill the Barcode

  09-12-2022 19:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Robots may be the future, but robotic arms are apparently no good at using an old and steadfast form of technology: the barcode. Barcodes can be hard to find and might be affixed to oddly shaped products, Amazon said in a press release Friday, something robots can't troubleshoot very well. As a result, the company says it has a plan to kill the barcode. From a report: Using pictures of items in Amazon warehouses and training a computer model, the e-commerce giant has developed a camera system th
  
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• Colgate's 9 Billion Toothpaste Tubes Defy Effort To Recycle Them

  09-12-2022 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Colgate-Palmolive spent years devising a recyclable toothpaste tube. Pulling it off was a technical masterstroke, substituting plastic for a mix of materials that was historically tough to reclaim. The result, one executive said, was "nice squeezability." One big problem remains: Many sorting centers around the US don't accept them. From a report: The gap between Colgate's engineering success and the practicalities of where-do-we-toss-our-empties underscores a persistent challenge for corporate
  
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• Spyware Hacks of Federal Workers Could Run Into Hundreds, Lawmaker Says

  09-12-2022 18:21 via news.slashdot.org
  A US government probe into how many mobile phones belonging to diplomats and government workers have been infected with spyware could "easily run to the hundreds," according to a member of the House Intelligence Committee. From a report: Jim Himes, a Democrat representative from Connecticut, told Bloomberg News that the Biden administration is "just beginning to get an inkling of the magnitude of the problem." He predicted that the probe could find that spyware was used against "hundreds" of fed
  
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• China's Disappearing Data Stokes Fears of Hidden Covid Wave

  09-12-2022 17:42 via slashdot.org
  Edward White in Seoul and Qianer Liu in Hong Kong, reporting for Financial Times: China is under-reporting coronavirus cases and fatalities, obscuring the scale and severity of the health crisis just as the world's most populous country enters its deadliest phase of the pandemic, analysts warn. Official statistics on Friday revealed no new deaths and only 16,363 locally transmitted coronavirus cases in China, less than half the peak caseload reported last month. That is despite a stunning U-turn
  
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• Google Must Delete Search Results About You If They're Fake, EU Court Rules

  09-12-2022 17:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  People in Europe can get Google to delete search results about them if they prove the information is "manifestly inaccurate," the EU's top court has ruled. From a report: The case kicked off when two investment managers requested Google to dereference results of a search made on the basis of their names, which provided links to certain articles criticising that group's investment model. They say those articles contain inaccurate claims. Google refused to comply, arguing that it was unaware wheth
  
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• Cisco Releases Security Advisory for IP Phone 7800 and 8800 Series

  09-12-2022 16:59 via us-cert.cisa.gov
  Original release date: December 9, 2022
  Cisco released a security advisory for a vulnerability affecting IP Phone 7800 and 8800 Series. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service condition. For more information, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.CISA encourages users and administrators to review Cisco IP Phone 7800 and 8800 Series Cisco Discovery Protocol Stack Overflow Vulnerability and apply the necessary updates. This product is provided subject
  
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• SEC Issues New Guidance Requiring Companies To Disclose Cryptocurrency Risks

  09-12-2022 16:21 via news.slashdot.org
  The Securities and Exchange Commission has released new guidance, requiring companies that issue securities to disclose to investors their exposure and risk to the cryptocurrency market. From a report: The guidance comes about a month after FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, filed for bankruptcy after loan customer funds to a risky trading company that was founded by FTX's former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Over 100,000 customers were affected by the exchange's failure.
  On Wedn
  
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• Ericsson and Apple End Patent-Related Legal Row With Licence Deal

  09-12-2022 15:42 via apple.slashdot.org
  Ericsson said on Friday it had struck a global patent licence agreement with Apple, ending a row over royalty payments for the use of 5G wireless patents in iPhones. From a report: The Swedish telecoms equipment maker said the multi-year deal included global cross-licences for patented cellular standard-essential technologies, and granted certain other patent rights. The deal comes after Ericsson in January filed a second set of patent infringement lawsuits against the U.S. maker of iPhones. Bot
  
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• Stolen Data of Over 5 Million People Sold On Bot Markets

  09-12-2022 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Around five million people globally have had their data stolen and sold on the bot market till date, of which 600,000 are from India, making it the worst affected country, according to one of the world's largest VPN serice providers NordVPN. From the report: Bot markets are used by hackers to sell stolen data from victims' devices with bot malware. The study by NordVPN, of Lithuania's Nord Security, said the stolen data included user logins, cookies, digital fingerprints, screenshots and other i
  
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• Class-Action Alleging Fortnite Is Addictive Will Go Ahead, Judge Rules

  09-12-2022 14:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  "The CBC is reporting that a class action lawsuit against Epic Games over Fortnite being addictive to children will go ahead," writes Slashdot reader lowvisioncomputing. From the report: The suit was first brought to the courts in 2019 by three Quebec parents who claimed that Fortnite was designed to addict its users, many of them children, to the game. According to the original filing, the plaintiffs say their children exhibited troubling behaviors, including not sleeping, not eating, not showe
  
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• NASA'S ICON Space Weather Satellite Has Suddenly Gone Silent

  09-12-2022 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A three-year-old NASA satellite lost touch with ground controllers two weeks ago and is now wandering through low Earth orbit without supervision. Sadly, the space agency fears the worst. Gizmodo reports: NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission has not communicated with ground stations since November 25 due to some sort of glitch the space agency is yet to identify, NASA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The spacecraft is equipped with an onboard command loss timer that's designed
  
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• Japanese Billionaire Unveils the 8 Artists He'll Fly To the Moon On SpaceX's Starship dearMoon Flight

  09-12-2022 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A Japanese billionaire picked his crewmates for the first-ever artist-centered mission. Space.com reports: Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune as an online fashion retailer, announced the eight people who would be flying with him on the dearMoon mission, which aims to use a SpaceX Starship to fly around the moon as soon as next year. "I hope each and every one will recognize the responsibility that comes with leaving the Earth, travelling to the moon and back," Maezawa says in the video in Japa
  
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• General Motors Installs the First of 40,000 New EV Chargers

  09-12-2022 04:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Electric vehicle drivers in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and Owosso, Michigan, are the first to benefit from General Motors' Dealer Community Charging Program. These deployments of new level 2 (AC) chargers are the first in a planned rollout of 40,000 new plug-in points, which GM says will nearly double the number of public charging stations in the US and Canada. GM announced the program in October 2021 and since then has had almost 1,000 of its C
  
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• Did Sam Bankman-Fried Finally Admit the Obvious?

  09-12-2022 03:02 via slashdot.org
  CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn writes in an opinion piece: Despite the focus on FTX following its catastrophic collapse, it's remarkable how little we know about how the crypto exchange and its in-house trading firm Alameda Research actually operated. New CEO John Jay Ray III has called Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto trading empire the "greatest failure of corporate controls" he's seen. Wednesday, Coffeezilla, a YouTuber with a rising star who has made a career of shining a light on sketchy projects in and
  
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• AI Learns To Write Computer Code In 'Stunning' Advance

  09-12-2022 02:25 via developers.slashdot.org
  DeepMind's new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to "achieve approximately human-level performance" in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine:AlphaCode's creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of code from GitHub, just to familiarize it with coding syntax and
  
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• Windows 11 Is Finally Getting a Built-In Screen Recording Tool

  09-12-2022 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft is finally bringing a built-in screen recorder to Windows. The Verge reports: The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 will soon be updated to include screen recording, meaning Windows users won't have to rely on the Xbox Game Bar or third-party tools just to record their screens. Windows 11 testers will start getting access to the updated Snipping Tool today, and the new record option will allow you to record an entire screen or even a section that gets cropped. The update comes more than four
  
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• Cyberattack On Top Indian Hospital Highlights Security Risk

  09-12-2022 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The leading hospital in India's capital limped back to normalcy on Wednesday after a cyberattack crippled its operations for nearly two weeks. Online registration of patients resumed Tuesday after the hospital was able to access its server and recover lost data. The hospital worked with federal authorities to restore the system and strengthen its defenses. It's unclear who conducted the Nov. 23 attack on the All India Institute of Me
  
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• Vivaldi Integrates Mastodon In Its Desktop Browser

  09-12-2022 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  Vivaldi recently became the first browser to have its own Mastodon instance, Vivaldi Social. Now, the new version on the desktop is the first to integrate Mastodon into the browser itself, along with the ability to pin tab groups and other UI improvements. From a blog post: We believe in providing alternatives to Big Tech while putting your privacy first and launched Vivaldi Social, our Mastodon instance. And today we are integrating Vivaldi Social into the sidebar of our desktop browser becomin
  
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• Samsung Galaxy S22 Hacked Again On Second Day of Pwn2Own

  09-12-2022 00:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Contestants hacked the Samsung Galaxy S22 again during the second day of the consumer-focused Pwn2Own 2022 competition in Toronto, Canada. They also demoed exploits targeting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers, printers, smart speakers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices from HP, NETGEAR, Synology, Sonos, TP-Link, Canon, Lexmark, and Western Digital. BleepingComputer reports: Security researchers representing the vulnerability research company Interrupt Labs were the ones to demonstrate
  
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