ICT news

• The New US-China Proxy War Over Undersea Internet Cables

  25-03-2023 23:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  400 undersea cables carry 95% of the world's international internet traffic, reports Reuters (citing figures from Washington-based telecommunications research firm TeleGeography).
  But now there's "a growing proxy war between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come."In February, American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and
  
  Read more

• Google Security Researchers Accuse CentOS of Failing to Backport Kernel Fixes

  25-03-2023 22:36 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:
  Google Project Zero is a security team responsible for discovering security flaws in Google's own products as well as software developed by other vendors. Following discovery, the issues are privately reported to vendors and they are given 90 days to fix the reported problems before they are disclosed publicly.... Now, the security team has reported several flaws in CentOS' kernel.
  As detailed in the technical document here, Google Project Zero's security resea
  
  Read more

• Amazon Rejects Petition from 30,000 Workers Opposing Return-to-Office Mandate

  25-03-2023 21:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares this report from the New York Post:Disgruntled Amazon corporate employees are reportedly devastated after a top human resources executive shot down an internal petition that asked the tech giant's leaders to nix its return-to-office plan. Approximately 30,000 workers had signed a petition begging CEO Andy Jassy to cancel his directive that most employees work on site at least three days per week. The return-to-office plan is slated to take effect on May 1.
  Beth Galetti
  
  Read more

• DoomLinux: the Distro That Loads Only Enough Software to Play DOOM

  25-03-2023 20:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Hackaday recently shared some thoughts on "purpose-built" distros:Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans.
  Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.... It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specificall
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• FSF Honors Emacs Co-Maintainer, 'Replicant' Developer, and Videoconferencing Tool Jami

  25-03-2023 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Free Software Foundation held their annual LibrePlanet conference last week — and announced that Eli Zaretskii, co-maintainer of GNU Emacs, won their "Advancement of Free Software" award. "He has been a contributor to Emacs for more than thirty years," notes the FSF announcement, "and as co-maintainer, coordinates the work of more than two hundred active contributors. During Zaretskii's tenure as co-maintainer, the Emacs development community has implemented several important new featu
  
  Read more

• TikTok Trackers Embedded in U.S. State-Government Websites, Review Finds

  25-03-2023 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Toronto-based Feroot Security "found that so-called tracking pixels from the TikTok parent company were present in 30 U.S. state-government websites across 27 states," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including some where the app has been banned from state networks and devices." The review was performed in January and February.The presence of that code means that U.S. state governments around the country are inadvertently participating in a data-collection effort for a foreign-owned company, on
  
  Read more

• Internet Archive Loses in Court. Judge Rules They Can't Scan and Lend eBooks

  25-03-2023 17:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Verge reports:
  A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create "derivative works," and so would have needed authorization from the books' copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out thro
  
  Read more

• OpenAI Admits ChatGPT Leaked Some Payment Data, Blames Open-Source Bug

  25-03-2023 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI took ChatGPT offline earlier this week "due to a bug in an open-source library which allowed some users to see titles from another active user's chat history," according to an OpenAI blog post. "It's also possible that the first message of a newly-created conversation was visible in someone else's chat history if both users were active around the same time....
  "Upon deeper investigation, we also discovered that the same bug may have caused the unintentional visibility of payment-related i
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• A Geometric Shape That Does Not Repeat Itself When Tiled

  25-03-2023 15:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  IHTFISP shares a report from Phys.Org: A quartet of mathematicians from Yorkshire University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Waterloo and the University of Arkansas has discovered a 2D geometric shape that does not repeat itself when tiled. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have written a paper describing how they discovered the unique shape and possible uses for it. Their full paper is available on the arXiv preprint server. [...]The shape
  
  Read more

• Major Shake-Up Coming For Fermilab

  25-03-2023 14:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has quietly begun a new competition for the contract to run the United States's sole dedicated particle physics laboratory. Announced in January, the rebid comes 1 year after Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which is managed in part by the University of Chicago (UChicago), failed an annual DOE performance review and 9 months after it named a new director. DOE would
  
  Read more

• Natural History Museums Join Forces To Produce Global Digital Inventory

  25-03-2023 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Dozens of the world's largest natural history museums revealed on Thursday a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to mosquitoes. The New York Times reports: The survey's organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change
  
  Read more

• Starlink Rival OneWeb Poised for Global Coverage After Weekend Launch

  25-03-2023 08:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  British satellite company OneWeb is gearing up for the launch of its final batch of internet satellites, completing a constellation in low Earth orbit despite some hiccups along the way. Gizmodo reports: India's heaviest launch vehicle LVM-3 will carry 36 OneWeb satellites, with liftoff slated for Sunday at 11:30 p.m. ET, according to OneWeb. The launch will take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, marking OneWeb's second deployment from India. You can watch the launch
  
  Read more

• United Airlines Reveals First eVTOL Passenger Route Starting In 2025

  25-03-2023 04:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2025, United Airlines will fly an air taxi service between the downtown Vertiport Chicago and O'Hare International Airport, using electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft it is purchasing from Archer Aviation. The Archer Midnight eVTOL aircraft will complete the route in about 10 minutes; according to local resident and Ars Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, that journey by car can take over an hour due to road construction. "Both Arche
  
  Read more

• Intel Co-Founder/Creator of 'Moore's Law' Gordon Moore Dies at Age 94

  25-03-2023 03:02 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Intel announced Friday that Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, has died at the age of 94:Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore initially served as executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979, Moore was named chairman of the board and chief executive officer, posts he held until 1987, when he gave up the CEO position and continued as chairman. In 1997, Moore became chairman emeritus, stepping down in 2006.
  During his lifetime, Mo
  
  Read more

• Huawei Claims To Have Built Its Own 14nm Chip Design Suite

  25-03-2023 02:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes. The Register reports: Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others. Huawei's EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirm
  
  Read more

• France Bans 'Recreational Apps' From Government Staff Phones

  25-03-2023 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  France announced Friday it is banning the "recreational" use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and other apps on government employees' phones because of concern about insufficient data security measures. Reuters reports: The French Minister for Transformation and Public Administration, Stanislas Guerini, said in a statement that ''recreational" apps aren't secure enough to be used in state administrative services and "could present a risk for the protection of data." The ban will be monitored by Fra
  
  Read more

• VW Will Support Software Products For Up To 15 Years

  25-03-2023 01:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jonathan M. Gitlin: A perennial question that has accompanied the spread of Android Automotive has been the question of support. A car has a much longer expected service life than a smartphone, especially an Android smartphone, and with infotainment systems so integral to a car's operations now, how long can we reasonably expect those infotainment systems to be supported? I got the chance to put this question to Dirk Hilgenberg, C
  
  Read more

• GitHub.com Rotates Its Exposed Private SSH Key

  25-03-2023 00:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  GitHub has rotated its private SSH key for GitHub.com after the secret was was accidentally published in a public GitHub repository. BleepingComputer reports: The software development and version control service says, the private RSA key was only "briefly" exposed, but that it took action out of "an abundance of caution." In a succinct blog post published today, GitHub acknowledged discovering this week that the RSA SSH private key for GitHub.com had been ephemerally exposed in a public GitHub r
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!