ICT news

• FCC Orders Phone Companies To Block Scam Text Messages

  16-03-2023 23:42 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today finalized rules requiring mobile carriers to block robotext messages that are likely to be illegal. The FCC described the rules as the agency's "first regulations specifically targeting the increasing problem of scam text messages sent to consumers." Carriers will be required to block text messages that come from "invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers." Carriers must also block texts from "number
  
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• A Video Game Company Made a Bot the CEO, and Its Stock Climbed

  16-03-2023 23:05 via slashdot.org
  
  Even before AI chatbot ChatGPT made headlines late last year, a video game company said it had already made a bot its CEO. An anonymous reader shares a report: In August, the Chinese gaming company NetDragon Websoft announced it had appointed an "AI-powered virtual humanoid robot" named Tang Yu as the chief executive of its subsidiary, Fujian NetDragon Websoft. NetDragon stock has since outperformed the Hang Seng Index, which tracks the biggest companies listed in Hong Kong, per The Hustle. The
  
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• Meta AI Unlocks Hundreds of Millions of Proteins To Aid Drug Discovery

  16-03-2023 22:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has created a tool to predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins using artificial intelligence. Researchers say it promises to deepen scientists' understanding of biology, and perhaps speed the discovery of new drugs. From a report: Meta's research arm, Meta AI, used the new AI-based computer program known as ESMFold to create a public database of 617 million predicted proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of life and of many medicines,
  
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• YouTube TV Hikes Price To $72.99 Per Month Due To Rising 'Content Costs'

  16-03-2023 21:42 via news.slashdot.org
  
  YouTube has announced that it's raising the price of its YouTube TV subscription to $72.99 per month. From a report: The new monthly price is an $8 increase from the current $64.99 monthly fee. New members will see the new price starting today, while existing members will see the price change staring on April 18. The Google-owned company blames a rise in "content costs" for the change. To soften the blow, the company announced that it's lowering the price of its 4K Plus add-on from $19.99 per mo
  
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• First Republic Bank Becomes the Latest Bank To Be Rescued, This Time By Its Rivals

  16-03-2023 20:51 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Some of the biggest banks in the U.S. are stepping in to save First Republic Bank. From a report: A group of 11 lenders including J.P.Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo said they will deposit $30 billion in First Republic Bank in an effort to prop up the beleagured midsized lender. The rescue comes after confidence in smaller lenders cratered following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in what has been an extraordinary week for U.S. lenders. "This action by A
  
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• The NPM Registry's Safe Word is Socket

  16-03-2023 20:23 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Socket has found a way to protect developers from npm, GitHub's insufficiently safe JavaScript package manager, by wrapping it in a security blanket. The npm registry, operated by NPM until the security biz was acquired by Microsoft's GitHub in 2020, hosts software packages for the JavaScript ecosystem. It is, by its own account, "the world's largest software registry." In the past few years, the maliciously inclined have increasingly focused on compromising
  
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• France Plans To Recommend Ministers Give Up TikTok, Other Apps

  16-03-2023 19:49 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The French government is planning to ask cabinet ministers to avoid using TikTok and similar apps on their personal phones, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. From the report: The government is mulling the guidelines in part over concerns about security with the Chinese-owned social media app, according to one of the people. They requested anonymity in order to discuss private deliberations. Social media apps such as TikTok are already b
  
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• TSMC Founder Says He Supports US Efforts To Slow China's Chip Advances

  16-03-2023 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The retired founder of TSMC said on Thursday that even as he supported U.S. efforts to slow China's advances in the semiconductor industry, the "bifurcation" of the global supply chain and the reversal of globalisation would increase prices and reduce the ubiquity of chips that power the modern world. From a report: "There's no question in my mind that, in the chip sector, globalisation is dead. Free trade is not quite that dead, but it's in danger," Morris Chang said, speaking at an event hoste
  
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• Ethereum's Shanghai Upgrade to Enable Withdrawals Set for April

  16-03-2023 18:33 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Ethereum's next major software upgrade, which could make crypto's biggest commercial highway more attractive to investors and developers alike, will take place around April 12. From a report: Called Shanghai, it will let people who pledged their Ether tokens to order transactions on the Ethereum blockchain to withdraw them. Currently, some 17.5 million of such so-called staked Ether, worth about $29 billion at current prices, can't be accessed on the network, although the coins do earn their own
  
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• FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC Release #StopRansomware: LockBit 3.0

  16-03-2023 18:29 via cisa.gov
  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CISA, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) has released a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: LockBit 3.0. This joint advisory details known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that FBI investigations correlated with LockBit 3.0 ransomware as recently as March 2023. LockBit 3.0 functions as an affiliate-based ransomware variant and is a continuation of LockBit 2
  
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• Microsoft Announces Copilot: the AI-Powered Future of Office Documents

  16-03-2023 17:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is announcing a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services today, designed to assist people with generating documents, emails, presentations, and much more. From a report: The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant (remember Clippy?), appearing in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even he
  
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• UK Bans TikTok from Government Mobile Phones

  16-03-2023 17:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  Britain is to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from ministers' and civil servants' mobile phones, bringing the UK in line with the US and the European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing. From a report: The decision marks a sharp U-turn from the UK's previous position and came a few hours after TikTok said its owner, ByteDance, had been told by Washington to sell the app or face a possible ban in the country. The UK government's announcement was made on T
  
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• Mozilla Releases Security Updates for Firefox 111, Firefox ESR 102.9, and Thunderbird 102.9

  16-03-2023 16:46 via cisa.gov
  Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox 111, Firefox ESR 102.9, and Thunderbird 102.9. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
  CISA encourages users and administrators to review Mozilla’s security advisories for Firefox 111, Firefox ESR 102.9, and Thunderbird 102.9 for more information and apply the necessary updates.
  Please share your thoughts. We recently updated our anonymous Product Fee
  
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• Baidu Shares Fall After Ernie AI Chatbot Demo Disappoints

  16-03-2023 16:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China's answer to ChatGPT. From a report: The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products. But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of
  
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• Amazon Tax Structure Like Something Out of a Bond Movie, EU Says

  16-03-2023 15:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon's efforts to minimize its taxes in the European Union were given a code-name evocative of a spy thriller with British agent 007, according to an EU lawyer, who claimed the arrangements broke the bloc's state-aid rules. From a report: "Project Goldcrest -- it sounds like the title of a James Bond movie, but it is not," it's the name "Amazon gave to a complex tax construction by which it fundamentally reorganized its global business," European Commission attorney Paul-John Loewenthal told a
  
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• 20 Years Later, Second Life is Launching on Mobile

  16-03-2023 15:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time -- and now it's coming to mobile for the first time. From a report: In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form. In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life develo
  
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• South Korea U-Turns On 69-Hour Working Week After Youth Backlash

  16-03-2023 14:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: South Korea's government has been forced to rethink a planned rise in working hours after a backlash from younger people who said the move would destroy their work-life balance and put their health at risk. The government had intended to raise the maximum weekly working time to 69 hours after business groups complained that the current cap of 52 hours was making it difficult to meet deadlines. But protests from the country's millennials and
  
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• Google Discontinues the Glass Enterprise Edition

  16-03-2023 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google has announced today that it will no longer be selling its Glass Enterprise Edition 2 headsets, with support set to be discontinued later this year. 9to5Google reports: After the commercial failure of its original Google Glass headsets, the company segued the AR product into a solution for businesses and industrial customers, intended to allow workers to stay connected in a hands-free way. This lineup, dubbed Glass Enterprise Edition, received a second-generation update in 2019, which was
  
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• Virgin Orbit Pauses Operations For a Week, Furloughs Nearly Entire Staff

  16-03-2023 08:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Virgin Orbit is furloughing nearly all its employees and pausing operations for a week as it looks for a funding lifeline, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. From the report: Company executives briefed staff on the situation in an all-hands meeting at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, according to people who were in the meeting. The furlough is unpaid, though employees can cash in PTO, with only a small team continuing to work. Virgin Orbit is also moving up payroll by a week to Friday. In the all
  
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• 1,100 Scientists and Students Barred From UK Amid China Crackdown

  16-03-2023 04:30 via politics.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's
  
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• Slashdot Asks: How Are You Using ChatGPT?

  16-03-2023 03:02 via ask.slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to give solutions to complex problems almost instantly and with nothing more than a text prompt. Up until yesterday, ChatGPT was based on GPT-3.5, a deep learning language model that was trained on an impressive 175 billion parameters. Now, it's based on GPT-4, capable of solving even more complex problems with greater accuracy (40% percent more likely to give factual responses). It's also capable of receiving images as a basis for i
  
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• Nasdaq Tells Yandex, Other Russian Firms of Plan To Delist Stocks

  16-03-2023 02:25 via slashdot.org
  
  The Nasdaq stock exchange has informed Russian Internet giant Yandex and e-commerce firm Ozon that their stocks will be delisted, the companies said on Wednesday, more than a year after trading in their securities was suspended. Reuters reports: Nasdaq suspended trading in the securities of a number of companies operating in Russia days after Moscow despatched tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Yandex and Ozon said they would appeal the decision. Neither company has fallen
  
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• DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay Renderer Code Published

  16-03-2023 01:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Today, DreamWorks published the open-source code for MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animation films. "OpenMoonRay is available via DreamWorks Animation's GitHub," reports Phoronix. "This professional-grade renderer is available under an Apache 2.0 license."From the README: "MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically base
  
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• All-Open Source 7-Inch MNT Reform Pocket Laptop Ships In October

  16-03-2023 01:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The creators of the all-open source MNT Reform laptop are getting nearer to launching its handheld counterpart: The crowdfunding campaign for the 7-inch MNT Pocket Reform has officially launched and is also serving as a de-facto preorder system for the device. The cheapest version of the Pocket Reform starts at $899, and it's also being offered in purple for $969 or in a bundle with a 1TB SSD, carrying case, handbook, and poster for $1,299.
  
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• Zipline Unveils P2 Delivery Drones That Dock and Recharge Autonomously

  16-03-2023 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Logistics startup Zipline unveiled its next-generation delivery drone, dubbed the Platform 2 or P2 Zip. According to CNBC, the new drone is "capable of carrying up to eight pounds worth of cargo within a ten-mile radius, and can land a package on a space as small as a table or doorstep." That number is important because the vast majority of packages shipped in the U.S. "weigh five pounds or less," says Zipline CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. From the report: The P2 Zip can travel ten
  
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