ICT news

• Power Line Bringing Wind Energy to the EU Planned That Crosses a 730-Mile Sea

  17-12-2022 23:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Once part of the USSR, the nation of Georgia seceded in 1991. Still located on Russia's southern border — and on the eastern edge of the Black Sea — it's now part of a four-country system that plans to transmit wind-generated electricity from Azerbaijan (to Georgia's east, also located on Russia's southern border) across an undersea cable below the Black Sea, through Romania and then on to Hungary.
  Expected to be completed within three or four years, it could become "a new power sour
  
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• If IT Workers Stay Home, What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown in America'?

  17-12-2022 22:34 via it.slashdot.org
  "Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America," reports the New York Times. "On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy..."[T]he vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019. Occupancy of the city's offices is roughly 7 percentage points below that of those in the average major American city, according to Kastle, the building security firm.
  More ominous for the city is that its downtown busi
  
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• As GitHub Retires 'Atom', Open Source 'Pulsar' Continues Its Legacy

  17-12-2022 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  In June GitHub announced they'd retire their customizable text editor Atom on December 15th — so they could focus their development efforts on the IDEs Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces. "As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly," according to a post on GitHub's blog.
  So while "GitHub and our community have benefited tremendously from those who have filed issues, created extensions, fixed bugs,
  
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• Atomic Bomb Pioneer J. Robert Oppenheimer Cleared of 'Black Mark' After 68 Years

  17-12-2022 20:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The Biden administration on Friday reversed a 1954 decision by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his work on the Manhattan Project.Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a written order that the since-dissolved AEC acted out of political motives when it revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance nearly 70 years ago. Oppenheimer died in 1967.*From the Santa Fe New Mexican:Fifty-five years
  
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• Linux Foundation Announces an Open Map Project and 'Open Metaverse Foundation'

  17-12-2022 19:35 via news.slashdot.org
  The Linux Foundation "sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and lead maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman," according to its page on Wikipedia. And now the Linux Foundation "is pleased to announce the launch of the Overture Maps Foundation," according to their December newsletter.
  It's a collaborative effort "to enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide."
  
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• Hundreds of Amazon Workers Will Go On Formal Strike for the First Time in the UK

  17-12-2022 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  CNBC reports:Hundreds of Amazon workers will go on strike, Britain's GMB union said Friday, marking a first for the company's employees in the U.K. Employees at Amazon's Coventry warehouse in central England voted Friday to go on strike, with the walkout likely to happen in January 2023. Roughly 1,000 people work at the Coventry facility.
  The workers are unhappy with a pay increase of 3%, or 50 pence per hour, Amazon introduced in the summer, which they say fails to match the rising cost of livi
  
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• Senator Wyden Urges FTC Probe of Neustar Over Possible Selling of User Data to Government

  17-12-2022 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Until 2020 Neustar was the domain name registry "for a number of top-level domains," according to its page on Wikipedia, "including .biz, .us (on behalf of United States Department of Commerce), .co, .nyc (on behalf of the city of New York), and .in.
  But now U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has asked America's Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Neustar violated the privacy rights of millions, reports the Washington Post, "when it sold records of where they went online to the federal governmen
  
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• John Carmack Resigns Meta VR Post, Leaves VR Industry, Criticizes Meta's 'Inefficiency'

  17-12-2022 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  "John Carmack, the programmer who brought us Doom, Quake and Oculus/Meta virtual reality products, has resigned from his executive consultant post for virtual reality at Meta," reports VentureBeat."This is the end of my decade in VR," Carmack wrote in an internal post (which he later reposted on Facebook).
  "I have mixed feelings."Quest 2 [Meta's VR headset] is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning — mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) scre
  
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• China Maps Out Plans to Put Astronauts on the Moon - and on Mars

  17-12-2022 16:34 via science.slashdot.org
  The New York Times cites predictions from American's Defense Department that China could surpass U.S. space capabilities as soon as 2045. "I think it's entirely possible they could catch up and surpass us, absolutely," said the staff director of the United States Space Force. "The progress they've made has been stunning — stunningly fast."
  But in a new article this week, the newspaper notes that China recenty sent space probes to the moon and to Mars — and invited foreign media to th
  
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• PineTab 2 Is Another Try At a Linux-Based Tablet, Without the 2020 Supply Crunch

  17-12-2022 14:00 via linux.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts
  
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• Google, Apple and Mozilla Team Up To Build a Better Browser Benchmark

  17-12-2022 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Speedometer 3 will be a "cross-industry collaborative effort" from the Chrome, Safari and Firefox makers to create a new model that balances the companies' visions for measuring responsiveness. Engadget reports: Three companies making a tool that will rate the effectiveness of their competing products sounds like a recipe for disaster. However, Speedometer's governance policy includes a consent system that differs based on potential ramifications. For example, significant changes will require ap
  
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• Pentagon Has Received 'Several Hundreds' of New UFO Reports

  17-12-2022 08:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  A new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects has received "several hundreds" of new reports, but no evidence so far of alien life, the agency's leadership told reporters Friday. The Associated Press reports: The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was set up in July and is responsible for not only tracking unidentified objects in the sky, but also underwater or in space -- or potentially an object that has the ability to move from one domain to the next. T
  
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• 60% of US Customers Prefer Businesses To Communicate Via Text and DMs, Report Finds

  17-12-2022 04:30 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: A new study from Intercom shows the stakes are high for customer support and overall customer experience (CX) this holiday season. The survey of 1,000 U.S. adults revealed 64% would leave a business if they didn't feel valued in a support interaction -- only falling behind not having their issue resolved (66%) and getting ghosted by a support representative (65%). Feeling valued and respected is even more important than a quick response (61%)
  
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• France's Nuclear Reactor Has Been Delayed Again

  17-12-2022 03:02 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Welding problems will require a further six-month delay for France's next-generation nuclear reactor at Flamanville, the latest setback for the flagship technology the country hopes to sell worldwide, state-owned electricity group EDF said Friday. Barron's reports: The delay will also add 500 million euros to a project whose total cost is now estimated at around 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion), blowing past the initial projection of 3.3 billion euros when construction began in 2007. It comes as
  
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• Amazon Acquires Film Rights To 'Warhammer 40,000'

  17-12-2022 02:25 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Longtime williamyf writes: Both ArsTechnica and The Register report that Amazon, Vertigo, and Games Worksop have entered a preliminary deal for the movie, TV, and merchandising rights of the Warhammer 40K franchise. The deal also brings Henry Cavill -- longtime Warhammer 40K fan, actor who played Geralt in Netflix's The Witcher series and Superman in the Zack Snyder DC superhero films -- as both executive producer and actor. While this is only a memorandum of understanding, it's highly likely th
  
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• Democrats Plan To Return Over $1 Million From FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried

  17-12-2022 01:45 via politics.slashdot.org
  Three top Democratic campaign arms said Friday that they would set aside more than $1 million in contributions from former crypto golden boy FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, as first reported by The Washington Post. The groups plan to return the money to FTX customers as part of ongoing legal proceedings. The Verge reports: The Democratic National Committee and two top Democratic campaign groups announced the moves days after Bankman-Fried was arrested and charged with eight counts, including wire
  
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• Oregon City Drops Fight To Keep Google Water Use Private

  17-12-2022 01:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Residents of The Dalles, Oregon, are learning how much of their water Google's data centers have been using to cool the computers inside the cavernous buildings -- information that previously was deemed a trade secret. A lawsuit by the city on behalf of Google -- against Oregon's biggest newspaper, The Oregonian/OregonLive -- that sought to keep the water-use information confidential was dropped, the newspaper reported Thursday. City
  
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• To Protect Its Cloud, Microsoft Bans Crypto Mining From Its Online Services

  17-12-2022 00:20 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds. The Register reports: The Windows and Azure titan slipped the prohibition into an update of its Universal License Terms for Online Services that came into effect on December 1. That document covers any "Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement," and on The Register's reading, mostly concerns itself with A
  
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