ICT news

• Some States Consider Legislation Making 4-Day Workweeks More Common

  27-02-2023 23:50 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A CBS News review found that at least half a dozen states, to varying degrees, are considering legislation to make four-day workweeks more common. From the report: Among those states is Maryland, where lawmakers recently introduced a bill proposing a pilot program "for the purpose of promoting, incentivizing, and supporting the experimentation and study of the use of a 4-day workweek by private and public employers." It would allow some employers that participate to claim a tax credit. Del. Vaug
  
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• Amazon Removes Books From Kindle Unlimited After They Appear On Pirate Sites

  27-02-2023 23:10 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Several independent publishers have had their books removed from Kindle Unlimited because they breached an exclusivity agreement with Amazon. The actions of the book giant are covered by the mutually agreed terms. However, in many cases, it's not the authors who breached the agreement, but pirate sites who copied them, as pirates do. [...] Over the past few weeks, several authors complained that Amazon had removed their books from Kindle Unl
  
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• Coinbase To Halt Trading of Binance USD for Not Meeting Listing Standards

  27-02-2023 22:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Coinbase will suspend trading of Binance USD (BUSD) on March 13 at around noon EST. From a report: The crypto exchange said the decision was based on its most recent review of the stablecoin, which Paxos recently stopped issuing following an order from a New York regulator. "Our determination to suspend trading for BUSD is based on our own internal monitoring and review processes," a Coinbase spokesperson told The Block. "When reviewing BUSD, we determined that it no longer met our listing stand
  
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• The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

  27-02-2023 21:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows -- shadows doing imp
  
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• Snapchat is Releasing Its Own AI Chatbot Powered by ChatGPT

  27-02-2023 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Snapchat is introducing a chatbot powered by the latest version of OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, it's a bet that AI chatbots will increasingly become a part of everyday life for more people. From a report: Named "My AI," Snapchat's bot will be pinned to the app's chat tab above conversations with friends. While initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers, the goal is to eventually make the bot available to all of Snapchat's 750 million monthly use
  
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• LinkedIn Scammers Step Up Sophistication of Online Attacks

  27-02-2023 20:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  LinkedIn has been hit by a rise in sophisticated recruitment scams, as fraudsters seek to take advantage of the trend towards remote working and widespread lay-offs across the tech sector. From a report: Jobseekers on the world's largest professional network are being defrauded out of money after taking part in fake recruitment processes set up by scammers who pose as employers, before obtaining personal and financial information. "There's certainly an increase in the sophistication of the attac
  
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• 'I Was an App Store Games Editor - That's How I Know Apple Doesn't Care About Games'

  27-02-2023 19:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It's not good enough.
  
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• No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work

  27-02-2023 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work. From a report: Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble o
  
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• As Heat Pumps Go Mainstream, a Big Question: Can They Handle Real Cold?

  27-02-2023 18:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Heat pumps, in contrast, (to gas or oil furnaces) don't generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300 percent efficiency in some cases. Because they are more efficient, using heat pumps to cool and heat homes can help homeowners save money on their utility bills, said Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocacy group. In Maine, where heat pump adoption is growing, but where a majority of homes s
  
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• Google Chrome's Improved Page Zoom Should Help Make the Mobile Web More Accessible

  27-02-2023 17:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Google Chrome's giving its page zoom feature a boost, which should make it more helpful for people who have difficulty reading the smaller screen on a phone. From a report: With the improved feature, you can increase the size of text, images, videos, and interactive controls on mobile web pages by up to 300 percent while preserving their original formatting. While the feature hasn't yet become available for all Chrome users, you can access it now if you download the Chrome beta on your phone or
  
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• America's Chip Moonshot Should Take Aim At Its Education System

  27-02-2023 17:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In the decade following US President John F Kennedy's 1961 announcement of America's mission to put a man on the moon, the number of physical science PhDs tripled, and that of engineering PhDs quadrupled. Now, the country is embarking on a moonshot to rebuild the semiconductor fabrication industry. Corporations that want a cut of the $39bn in manufacturing incentives within the Chips and Science Act programme can start filing their applications for subsidies
  
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• Mobile Giants Announce United Interface to Lure Cloud Developers

  27-02-2023 16:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An industry group representing the world's biggest mobile phone operators announced a new united interface that will give developers universal access to all of their networks, speeding up the delivery of new services and products. From a report: The GSMA will introduce the portal, called Open Gateway, at its annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, its Director General Mats Granryd said in an interview. AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Group are among the 21 GSMA
  
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• Unilever Tries Reformulating Its Ice Cream To Survive Warmer Freezers

  27-02-2023 15:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The packaged-goods giant aims to cut its environmental impact and retailers' electric bills. From a report: Unilever wants to warm up its ice cream freezers in convenience stores without turning its products into puddles, part of a broader effort to pursue green goals and potentially boost sales in the process.The consumer packaged goods giant, which sells ice cream brands including Ben & Jerry's and Magnum, is testing the performance of its products in freezers that are set to temperatures
  
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• Xiaomi Teases Augmented Reality Glasses

  27-02-2023 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Xiaomi unveiled wireless augmented reality glasses in the latest attempt to build momentum in an arena that has yet to become mainstream. From a report: The concept device from the Chinese phone maker is designed to let users gesture via its embedded camera to select and open apps, swipe through pages and exit apps to return to the start page, without using a smartphone. Dubbed Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass, the headset weighs 126 grams (4.4 ounces) and shows information to the user via two MicroOLED
  
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• New Wind and Solar Energy Projects Are Now Overwhelming America's Antiquated Electrical Grids

  27-02-2023 12:24 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures in America "has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses," reports the New York Times:So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away.More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the
  
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• SpaceX Launch of Six Astronauts to the ISS is Scrubbed

  27-02-2023 07:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  SpaceX is livestreaming coverage of its latest launch tonight. SpaceX and NASA were "preparing to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station," reports CNN, "continuing the public-private effort to keep the orbiting laboratory fully staffed and return astronaut launches to U.S. soil
  For this mission a reusable Falcon 9 rocket will eventually propel a Crew Dragon capsule into space — carrying six astronauts "from all over the world — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut
  
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• Asahi Linux Disputes Report That Linux 6.2 Will Run on Apple M1 Chips

  27-02-2023 06:14 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines."
  Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up."We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notabl
  
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• Security Researchers Warn of a 'New Class' of Apple Bugs

  27-02-2023 04:14 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Since the earliest versions of the iPhone, "The ability to dynamically execute code was nearly completely removed," write security researchers at Trellix, "creating a powerful barrier for exploits which would need to find a way around these mitigations to run a malicious program. As macOS has continually adopted more features of iOS it has also come to enforce code signing more strictly."The Trellix Advanced Research Center vulnerability team has discovered a large new class of bugs that allow b
  
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• Webb Telescope's Discovery of Massive Early Galaxies Still Defies Prior Understanding of Universe

  27-02-2023 02:59 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Pennsylvania State University has an announcement. "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe.""These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as m
  
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• Survey Claims Some Companies are Already Replacing Workers With ChatGPT

  27-02-2023 01:11 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes an article from Fortune:Earlier this month, job advice platform Resumebuilder.com surveyed 1,000 business leaders who either use or plan to use ChatGPT. It found that nearly half of their companies have implemented the chatbot. And roughly half of this cohort say ChatGPT has already replaced workers at their companies....
  Business leaders already using ChatGPT told ResumeBuilders.com their companies already use ChatGPT for a variety of reasons, including 66% for writin
  
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