ICT news

• Could We Make It To Mars Without NASA?

  24-12-2022 23:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Reason.com notes NASA's successful completion of its Artemis I mission, calling it "part of NASA's ambitious program to bring American astronauts back to the moon for the first time in half a century. And then on to Mars."
  But then they ask if the project is worth the money, with the transportation policy director at the libertarian "Reason Foundation" think tank, Robert W. Poole, arguing instead that NASA "isn't particularly interested in cost savings, and its decision making is overly driven b
  
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• FSF Warns: Stay Away From iPhones, Amazon, Netflix, and Music Steaming Services

  24-12-2022 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  For the last thirteen years the Free Software Foundation has published its Ethical Tech Giving Guide. But what's interesting is this year's guide also tags companies and products with negative recommendations to "stay away from."Stay away from: iPhonesIt's not just Siri that's creepy: all Apple devices contain software that's hostile to users. Although they claim to be concerned about user privacy, they don't hesitate to put their users under surveillance.
  Apple prevents you from installing thir
  
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• Fedora Change Proposal: Supporting Unified Kernel Images for Improved Security

  24-12-2022 21:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  While "this proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee," Phoronix reports:
  Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place.
  Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the k
  
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• Google's Quest for Clean Energy Impeded by Small-but-Dominant Utilities in Some US States

  24-12-2022 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta, Microsoft and Apple, and Google all want carbon-free power. But Google "says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities," reports the New York Times, especially those in America's Southeastern states which aren't facing a competitive market.Google's battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what's good for a few companies good for all?
  At the heart of their c
  
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• Six Arrested After Manipulating Gas Station Pumps To Steal 30,000 Gallons of Gas

  24-12-2022 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A Valero gas station sells approximately 5,000 gallons of gas a day, one employee estimates.
  But local police arrested six men who, in a series of robberies, tricked the pumps out of 30,000 gallons of gasoline, reports the Mercury News, "a haul authorities estimated was worth at least $180,000."Upon further inspection of surveillance video, authorities said, police saw one of the suspects activate a gas-pump computer, allowing another suspect to pump fuel into his vehicle.... An employee from th
  
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• Rust-GPU Project Now Supports SPIR-V Ray-tracing

  24-12-2022 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.
  Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort:Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along wi
  
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• Linux Foundation's 'AgStack Project' Plans First Dataset of the World's Agricultural Field Boundaries

  24-12-2022 17:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The nonprofit Linux Foundation not only pays the salary of Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman. It also runs the AgStack Foundation, which seeks more efficient agriculture through "free, re-usable, open and specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications."
  And this week that Foundation announced a new open source code base for creating and maintaining a global dataset that's a kind of registry for the boundaries of agricultural fields to enable field-level analytics like carbon tr
  
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• 23 Years Ago, Amazon Gave Barnes & Noble a 1-Click Patent Lawsuit For Xmas

  24-12-2022 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In recognition of the innovation and unique nature of 1-Click, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5960411 to Amazon.com for 1-Click on September 28, 1999," boasted an Oct. 1999 Amazon press release. "First made available to Amazon.com customers in September 1997, 1-Click combines with Gift-Click and Wish List to make Amazon.com the most convenient, easiest-to-use shopping destination this holiday season." The following day, Amazon weaponized its ne
  
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• Hotels Say Goodbye To Daily Room Cleanings and Hello To Robots as Workers Stay Scarce

  24-12-2022 13:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: This holiday season at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, Merle Ayers is feeling especially grateful for the Whiz. At two feet tall and 66 pounds, the powerful robot vacuum doesn't mind working late into the night after the parties are over. The Whiz doesn't care that it's the holidays. It doesn't even need a day off. "It just needs to be cared for. We have to change the vacuum bags periodically and keep the batteries charged," says Ayers, the hotel's dire
  
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• TikTok Banned on Government Devices Under Spending Bill Passed by Congress

  24-12-2022 10:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Under the bipartisan spending bill that passed both chambers of Congress as of Friday, TikTok will be banned from government devices, underscoring the growing concern about the popular video-sharing app owned by China's ByteDance. From a report: The bill, which still has to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, also calls on e-commerce platforms to do more vetting to help deter counterfeit goods from being sold online, and forces companies pursuing large mergers to pay more to file with fed
  
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• 'Classifying Aging as a Disease Could Speed FDA Drug Approvals'

  24-12-2022 06:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers aging to be a natural process. This makes it difficult to get FDA approval for drugs that seek to slow or reverse the biological process of aging. Instead, drugs intended to target aging must target a disease that often results from the aging process in order to demonstrate efficacy and gain approval. But there is growing consensus and effort among scientists to convince the FDA that aging itself should be clas
  
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• Gene-edited Hens May End Cull of Billions of Chicks

  24-12-2022 03:30 via science.slashdot.org
  Israeli researchers say they have developed gene-edited hens that lay eggs from which only female chicks hatch. From a report: The breakthrough could prevent the slaughter of billions of male chickens each year, which are culled because they don't lay eggs. The female chicks, and the eggs they lay when they mature, have no trace of the original genetic alteration Animal welfare group, Compassion in World Farming, has backed the research. Dr Yuval Cinnamon from the Volcani institute near Tel Aviv
  
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• AMD Improving Linux Experience When Running New GPUs Without Proper Driver Support

  24-12-2022 01:01 via linux.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly lo
  
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