ICT news

• Creator of Linux Virtual Assistant Blames 'Patent Troll' For Project's Death

  13-02-2023 23:40 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Laura Dobberstein writes via The Register: Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign. Furthermore, without immediate new investment, the company will be forced to cease development by the end of the month, said the company's former CEO and operator of the Kickstarter campaign, Joshua Montgomery. "We will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website, because the
  
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• Z-Library Returns, Offering 'Unique' Domain Name To All Users

  13-02-2023 23:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The U.S. Government's crackdown against Z-Library late last year aimed to wipe out the pirate library for good. The criminal prosecution caused disruption but didn't bring the site completely to its knees. Z-Library continued to operate on the dark web and this weekend, reappeared on the clearnet, offering a 'unique' domain name to all users. [...] Sites can often be seen hardening their operations to mitigate disruption caused by domain nam
  
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• Digital Asset Platform Bakkt To Discontinue Consumer App After Two Years

  13-02-2023 22:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Digital asset platform Bakkt is to discontinue its two-year-old consumer-facing app as its focus shifts toward business-to-business (B2B) tech services. From a report: Consumers will be able to continue to managing assets over the web after the app officially closes on March 16, Bakkt said Monday. The app went live in March 2021 with the aim of integrating crypto holdings with other digital assets such as airline miles, gift cards and loyalty points. Partnerships with firms including Starbucks,
  
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• Japan Formally Adopts Policy of Using Nuclear Reactors Beyond 60 Years

  13-02-2023 21:41 via slashdot.org
  
  Japan's Cabinet formally adopted a policy that will allow for the operation of nuclear reactors beyond their current 60-year limit alongside the building of new units to replace aging ones as part of efforts to cut carbon emissions while ensuring adequate national energy supply. From a report: The government's "green transformation" policy features extensive use of nuclear power along with renewable energy and marks a major policy shift for the country, which suffered a devastating nuclear disas
  
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• Meta Plans More Job Cuts, Report Says

  13-02-2023 21:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. From a report: According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March. In November, the company laid off 11,000 employees or about 13 percent of its global workforce. Those cuts were the largest in Meta's nearly 20-year histo
  
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• Beijing To Support Key Firms in Building ChatGPT-like AI Models

  13-02-2023 20:20 via slashdot.org
  
  China's capital Beijing will support leading enterprises in building large artificial intelligence (AI) models that can challenge ChatGPT, the city's economy and information technology bureau said on Monday. From a report: The city will support key firms to invest in building an open source framework and accelerate the supply of basic data, it said in a statement. The bureau also said that 1,048 core AI companies, or 29% of the country's total, were located in Beijing as of October last year, an
  
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• A Researcher Tried To Buy Mental Health Data. It Was Surprisingly Easy.

  13-02-2023 19:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  Sensitive mental health data is for sale by little-known data brokers, at times for a few hundred dollars and with little effort to hide personal information such as names and addresses, according to research released Monday. From a report: The research, conducted over the span of two months at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, which studies the ecosystem of companies buying and selling personal data, consisted of asking 37 data brokers for bulk data on people's mental health. E
  
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• The FBI's Most Controversial Surveillance Tool is Under Threat

  13-02-2023 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An existential fight over the US government's ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime. From a report: New details about the FBI's failures to comply with restr
  
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• The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump

  13-02-2023 18:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The fall in Mastodon's popularity suggests the decentralized platform is not a replacement for mainstream services. An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter users put Mastodon usernames in their handles and trumpeted their migration. The new traffic knocked many Mastodon instances, or servers, offline. In less than two months, Mastodon's monthly active users climbed from 380,000 to more than 2.5 million. But not everyone stuck around. Mastodon's active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 milli
  
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• Amazon Is Taking Half of Each Sale From Its Merchants

  13-02-2023 17:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Grappling with slowing sales growth and rising costs, Amazon is squeezing more money from the nearly 2 million small businesses that sell products on its sprawling online marketplace. From a report: For the first time, Amazon's average cut of each sale surpassed 50% in 2022, according to a study by Marketplace Pulse, which sampled seller transactions going back to 2016. The research firm calculated the total cost of selling on Amazon by tallying the commission on each sale, fees for warehouse st
  
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• Twilio To Lay Off About 1,500 Employees, or 17% of Its Workforce

  13-02-2023 17:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Twilio on Monday announced plans to cut around 17% of its workforce, or roughly 1,500 jobs based on the 8,992 employees reported as of Sept. 30, 2022, in a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Twilio announced the layoffs in a blog post shared on the company's website. From a report: The announcement came after the cloud communications software maker already laid off around 11% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan in September. In an email to employees, CEO Jef
  
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• Podcasts Lose Their Edge

  13-02-2023 16:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Podcasting has emerged out of years of rapid growth and a pandemic boom to face an identity crisis as its ecosystem contracts, advertisement slows and the medium eases into maturity. From a report: Podcasts changed the listening habits of millions of people over the last decade, but the once-groundbreaking format has settled into a more precarious middle age. Fewer people are creating new shows, networks are having difficulties recouping investments, and longtime podcasters are on the hunt for w
  
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• Crypto Firm Paxos Faces SEC Lawsuit Over Binance USD Token

  13-02-2023 15:42 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Securities and Exchange Commission has told crypto firm Paxos that it plans to sue the company for violating investor protection laws, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter, the latest move in the agency's escalating campaign in crypto enforcement. From the report: The SEC's enforcement staff issued a letter to Paxos known as a Wells notice, which the agency uses to inform companies and individuals of a possible enforcement action, according to the people. The notice alleges t
  
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• Google Employees Criticize CEO For 'Rushed, Botched' Announcement of GPT Competitor Bard

  13-02-2023 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google employees are criticizing leadership, most notably CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way the company handled the announcement last week of its ChatGPT competitor called Bard. From a report: Staffers took to the popular internal forum Memegen to express their thoughts on the Bard announcement, referring to it as "rushed," "botched" and "un-Googley," according to messages and memes viewed by CNBC. On Monday, Google got ahead of a Microsoft event the following day and had Pichai publicly divulge so
  
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• Documentary Film Aims To Dispel the Mysteries and Myths of Blockchain Technology

  13-02-2023 12:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader mabu writes: Adam R. Smith, a software engineer with 40+ years of experience reportedly became frustrated with his friends and associates' claims about the potential of crypto technology and their subsequent losses of money in various schemes, and set out to write a series of articles explaining what blockchain is and whether it lives up to its claims. This ended up morphing into a passion project that produced an 84 minute documentary entitled, "Blockchain — Inno
  
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• Sabine Hossenfelder's Scathing Video On the State of Particle Physics

  13-02-2023 08:24 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader flashflood writes:Science educator Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. But Hossenfelder's latest YouTube video expounds upon the sorry state of particle physics, and in the process also has some interesting sidenotes on dark matter.
  Hossenfelder criticises what has become the standard operating procedure of particle physicists, whereby they routinely predict the existence of particles that violate the Standard Model.
  
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• Super Bowl Ads Feature 'Mario Rap', Pixel Phone, Two Batmen, and Warnings of 'Premature Electrification'

  13-02-2023 06:26 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Despite the absence of cryptocurrency ads, this year's Super Bowl still managed some geek-friendly advertisements. There was even a riff on "the classic intro from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the live-action series that ran from 1989-1991," according to Kotaku: the infamous Mario Rap, which advertised Mario's plumbing business (and in its 2023 version featured the URL for a website).
  [T]hat website is indeed up and running, and is everything you would hope it would be from a struggling sma
  
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• US Military Shoots Down Fourth Flying Object Near Michigan

  13-02-2023 01:24 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. military shot down another high-altitude object Sunday, reports CNN — this one flying"The operation marks the third day in a row that an unidentified object was shot down over North American airspace."
  Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said Sunday that the operation to down the object over Lake Huron was carried out by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard.... The object was flying at 20,000 feet over Michigan's Upper Peninsula and was about to go over Lak
  
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• Bing 'Hallucinated' the Winner of the Super Bowl Four Days Before it Happened

  13-02-2023 00:34 via slashdot.org
  
  On Wednesday the Associated Press tested the new AI enhancements to Microsoft's search engine Bing, asking it "for the most important thing to happen in sports over the past 24 hours — with the expectation it might say something about basketball star LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career scoring record.
  "Instead, it confidently spouted a false but detailed account of the upcoming Super Bowl — days before it's actually scheduled to happen.""It was a thrilling game between
  
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