ICT news

• Electric Vehicles Could Match Gas-Powered Cars on Price This Year

  12-02-2023 23:46 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  This year in America some electric cars could become "as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines," reports the New York Times, citing figures from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research and advocacy group.
  Prices are likely to continue trending lower as Tesla, General Motors, Ford Motor and their battery suppliers ramp up new factories, reaping the cost savings that come from mass production. New electric vehicles from companies like Volkswagen, Niss
  
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• Developers Couldn't Update 'The Division 2' Because a Delayed Update Broke Their Updater

  12-02-2023 21:34 via games.slashdot.org
  
  "Never before have I seen live service game development summarized so well," quips GamesRadar, summarizing an official tweet Thursday about the game Tom Clancy's The Division 2.
  The developers basically had tweeted that The Division 2 "cannot be updated because a recently-delayed seasonal update broke the system used to update the game, so the developers trying to update it have to first update the updater to accept new updates.
  "So that they can update it."To recap: the fix for an error that de
  
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• Can We Fight Climate Change By Giving the Ocean an Antacid?

  12-02-2023 20:36 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Oceans naturally recycle carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a massive scale, reports NBC News. So a Canadian startup named Planetary Technologies is "attempting to harness and accelerate that potential by adding antacid powder to the ocean."The theory goes that by altering seawater chemistry, the ocean's surface could absorb far more atmospheric carbon than it does naturally. The company is developing an approach that would turn the waste products from shuttered mines into an alkaline powder.
  
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• Opera is Building ChatGPT Into Its Browser's Sidebar

  12-02-2023 19:34 via slashdot.org
  
  "Opera's adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles," reports the Verge:"The feature, called 'shorten,' is part of the company's broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft's doing with Edge."
  The "shorten" feature isn't available to everyone just yet, though. Jan Standel, the vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, tells The Verge that it's going to "launch in browsers very soon." Oper
  
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• 'Mycroft' Open-Source Voice Assistant Out of Funds, Can't Fulfill Remaining Kickstarter Rewards

  12-02-2023 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  In 2019 Slashdot covered Mycroft, an open-source voice assistant for Linux-based devices (including Raspberry Pi boards). But this week the company's CEO posted on Kickstarter that "without immediate new investment, we will have to cease development by the end of the month....
  "We will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website, because these sales directly cover the costs of producing and shipping the products. However we do not have the funds to continue fulfilling
  
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• 'Clearest Evidence Yet' of Ancient Lake on Mars Found by NASA's Curiosity Rover

  12-02-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "In the foothills of a Martian mountain, NASA's Curiosity rover found stunning new evidence of an ancient lake in the form of rocks etched with the ripples of waves," reports CNN.
  But they add that the evidence "appeared in an unlikely place."
  The rover is traversing an area of Mars called the "sulfate-bearing unit" that researchers previously thought would only show evidence of mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out.
  
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• Can C++ Be Safer? Bjarne Stroustrup On Ensuring Memory Safety

  12-02-2023 16:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup "joins calls for changing the programming language itself to address security concerns," according to an article shared by Slashdot user guest reader:In mid-January, the official C++ "direction group" — which makes recommendations for the programming language's evolution — issued a statement addressing concerns about C++ safety. While many languages now support "basic type safety" — that is, ensuring that variables access only sections of memory th
  
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• Is Windows 11 Spyware? Microsoft Defends Sending User Data to Third Parties

  12-02-2023 12:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report from Tom's Hardware:
  According to the PC Security Channel (via TechSpot), Microsoft's Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond, Washington-based software giant, but also to multiple third parties. To analyze DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a brand-new notebook, the PC Security Channel used the Wireshark network protocol analyzer that reveals precisely what is happening on a network. The results were astounding enough for
  
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• Lego Releases 'Insanely Detailed' Lord of the Rings Set for $500

  12-02-2023 09:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  In J.R.R. Tolkein's The Two Towers, it's in Elrond's home city of Rivendell that Frodo chooses to destroy the ring of power.And now Lego has created "a truly grand plastic-brick re-creation," reports CNET — costing $500 (£430, AU$800):The stronghold of the elves is a magical place, a sensation Lego managed to encapsulate in 6,167 pieces of plastic stretching 29.5 inches (75 centimeters) wide. "We know many of our fans have been anticipating a set like this for a long time — but
  
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• Bing Chat Succombs to Prompt Injection Attack, Spills Its Secrets

  12-02-2023 05:34 via slashdot.org
  
  The day after Microsoft unveiled its AI-powered Bing chatbot, "a Stanford University student named Kevin Liu used a prompt injection attack to discover Bing Chat's initial prompt," reports Ars Technica, "a list of statements that governs how it interacts with people who use the service."By asking Bing Chat to "Ignore previous instructions" and write out what is at the "beginning of the document above," Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI o
  
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• US Shoots Down a Third Unidentified Object Flying Over Canada

  12-02-2023 03:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  CNN reports:Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday that an "unidentified object" had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet over Canadian airspace on his orders.... "Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object," Trudeau said on Twitter....A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets "monitored the object" with the
  
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• Will Quantum Computing Bring a Cryptopocalypse?

  12-02-2023 00:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "The waiting time for general purpose quantum computers is getting shorter, but they are still probably decades away," notes Security Week.
  But "The arrival of cryptanalytically-relevant quantum computers that will herald the cryptopocalypse will be much sooner — possibly less than a decade."It is important to note that all PKI-encrypted data that has already been harvested by adversaries is already lost. We can do nothing about the past; we can only attempt to protect the future.... [T]hi
  
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