ICT news

• E3 2023 Has Been Canceled

  30-03-2023 23:20 via games.slashdot.org
  
  E3 2023 has been called off "after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn't be participating in the event," reports The Verge. From the report: E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3's revival. According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 "simply d
  
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• South Korea Passes Tax Break-Driven 'Chips Act' as Protectionism Fears Mount

  30-03-2023 22:40 via slashdot.org
  
  South Korea has passed legislation giving tax breaks to its semiconductor companies in a bill being labelled as the "Korean Chips Act." At the same time, the nation's trade minister repeated its complaints that the criteria for Korean companies to access US funding are unpalatable in a possible sign of growing protectionism in the worldwide chip market. From a report: To bump up the level of tax breaks, the Korean National Assembly passed a revision bill to the Restriction of Special Taxation Ac
  
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• Inside the Deepfake Porn Economy

  30-03-2023 22:00 via slashdot.org
  
  The nonconsensual deepfake economy has remained largely out of sight, but it's easily accessible, and some creators can accept major credit cards. From a report: Digitally edited pornographic videos featuring the faces of hundreds of unconsenting women are attracting tens of millions of visitors on websites, one of which can be found at the top of Google search results. The people who create the videos charge as little as $5 to download thousands of clips featuring the faces of celebrities, and
  
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• US, Partner Countries Call For Controls To Counter Misuse of Spyware

  30-03-2023 21:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The United States and some of its partner countries on Thursday called for strict domestic and international controls to counter the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware. From a report: The joint statement was issued by the governments of Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The countries said they were committed to preventing the export of technology and equipment to end-users who are likel
  
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• Amazon Seller Consultant Admits To Bribing Employees To Help Clients

  30-03-2023 20:40 via slashdot.org
  
  An influential consultant for Amazon sellers has admitted to bribing employees of the e-commerce giant for information to help his clients boost sales and to get their suspended accounts reinstated. From a report: Ephraim "Ed" Rosenberg wrote in a LinkedIn post that he will plead guilty in federal court to a criminal charge, stemming from a 2020 indictment that charged six people with conspiring to give sellers an unfair competitive advantage on Amazonâ(TM)s third-party marketplace. Four o
  
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• 'One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now'

  30-03-2023 20:02 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Gabi Dobocan, writing at auditing firm Sandworm: More than half of all new packages that are currently (29 Mar 2023) being submitted to npm are SEO spam. That is - empty packages, with just a single README file that contains links to various malicious websites. Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam. Just in the last hour as of writing this article, 1583 new e-book spam packages have been published. All
  
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• AI Image Generator Midjourney Stops Free Trials Citing 'Abuse'

  30-03-2023 19:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: AI image generator Midjourney has halted free trials of its service after a number of its generations -- including fabricated images of Donald Trump being arrested and the pope wearing a stylish jacket -- went viral online, with many mistaking the fakes for real photographs. Midjourney CEO and founder David Holz announced the change on Tuesday, citing "extraordinary demand and trial abuse."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• FTC Should Stop OpenAI From Launching New GPT Models, Says AI Policy Group

  30-03-2023 18:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An artificial intelligence-focused tech ethics group has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI for violating consumer protection rules, arguing that the organization's rollout of AI text generation tools has been "biased, deceptive, and a risk to public safety." From a report: The Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) filed its complaint today following the publication of a high-profile open letter calling for a pause on large generative AI experiments. CAIDP president Marc
  
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• SEC Chair Gensler: Existing Rules Regulate Crypto, Legislation Unnecessary

  30-03-2023 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Securities and Exchange Commission takes the lead in defining what a security is, not necessarily legislation, the regulator's Chair Gary Gensler said. From a report: After a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, Gensler told reporters that existing securities laws "cover most of the activity that's happening in the crypto markets. If Congress were to act, though I don't think we need these authorities, not to undermine inadvertently through definitions of what's in or out, or
  
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• Google Says Microsoft Cloud Practices Are Anti-Competitive

  30-03-2023 17:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Alphabet's Google Cloud has accused Microsoft of anti-competitive cloud computing practices and criticised imminent deals with several European cloud vendors, saying these do not solve broader concerns about its licensing terms. From a report: In Google Cloud's first public comments on Microsoft and its European deals its Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters the company has raised the issue with antitrust agencies and urged European Union antitrust regulators to take a closer look.
  In respons
  
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• Google Denies Bard Was Trained With ChatGPT Data

  30-03-2023 16:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Bard hasn't exactly had an impressive debut -- and The Information is reporting that the company is so interested in changing the fortunes of its AI chatbots, it's forcing its DeepMind division to help the Google Brain team beat OpenAI with a new initiative called Gemini. The Information's report also contains the potentially staggering thirdhand allegation that Google stooped so low as to train Bard using data from OpenAI's ChatGPT, scraped from a w
  
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• Russia Arrests Wall Street Journal Reporter on Spying Charge

  30-03-2023 16:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Russia's security service arrested an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal on espionage charges, the first time a U.S. correspondent has been detained on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations. From a report: Evan Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information, the Federal Security Service, known by the acronym FSB, said Thursday. The service, which is the top domestic secu
  
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• Microsoft Slips Ads Into AI-Powered Bing Chat

  30-03-2023 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is "exploring" putting ads in the responses given by Bing Chat, its new search agent powered by OpenAI's GPT-4. Microsoft confirmed this is happening, albeit in an experimental form, in a blog post published today. Here's the relevant bit from the very end after "a bit of context" explaining no one should be surprised: "We are also exploring additional capabilities for publishers including our more than 7,500 Microsoft Start partner b
  
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• Supply Chain Attack Against 3CXDesktopApp

  30-03-2023 14:00 via cisa.gov
  CISA is aware of open-source reports describing a supply chain attack against 3CX software and their customers. According to the reports, 3CXDesktopApp — a voice and video conferencing app — was trojanized, potentially leading to multi-staged attacks against users employing the vulnerable app.
  CISA urges users and organizations to review the following reports for more information, and hunt for the listed indicators of compromise (IOCs) for potential malicious activity:
  CrowdStrike: F
  
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• CISA Adds Ten Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  30-03-2023 14:00 via cisa.gov
  CISA has added ten new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.
  CVE-2013-3163 Microsoft Internet Explorer Memory Corruption Vulnerability
  CVE-2014-1776 Microsoft Internet Explorer Memory Corruption Vulnerability
  CVE-2017-7494 Samba Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
  CVE-2022-42948 Fortra Cobalt Strike User Interface Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
  CVE-2022-39197 Fortra Cobalt Strike Teamserver Cro
  
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• Mark Hamill Voices Air Raid Warnings In Ukraine As Luke Skywalker

  30-03-2023 12:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has lent his voice to a Ukrainian air raid app to warn citizens of incoming attacks during the ongoing conflict with Russia. The Verge reports: "Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter," says Hamill over Air Alert, an app linked to Ukraine's air defense system. When the threat has passed, Hamill signs off with "The alert is over. May the Force be with you."Invoking his beloved Luke Skywalker character, some of the lines contain recognizable quotes fr
  
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• Sugar-Powered Implant Successfully Manages Type 1 Diabetes

  30-03-2023 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers have developed a novel fuel cell implant for type 1 diabetes that can successfully produce and release insulin when triggered. New Atlas reports: The fuel cell itself, which resembles a teabag that's slightly larger than a fingernail, is covered in a nonwoven fabric and coated with alginate, an algae-derived product used widely in biomedicine because of its high degree of biocompatibility. When implanted under the skin, the cell's alginate soaks up body fluid, allowing glucose to per
  
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• A Group of College Students Are Sending a Rover To the Moon

  30-03-2023 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The U.S., Soviet Union, and Japan have all sent robots to the moon over the past 50 years. Now, a group of college students is joining in by building a shoebox-sized rover that they plan to launch in May, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The lunar rover, called Iris, will be the first privately-made American robot to explore the surface of the moon, according to the project's website. But that's not all -- it would also be the first student-built ro
  
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• 'Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down'

  30-03-2023 04:02 via slashdot.org
  
  Earlier today, more than 1,100 artificial intelligence experts, industry leaders and researchers signed a petition calling on AI developers to stop training models more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 for at least six months. Among those who refrained from signing it was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. and lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a found
  
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• Google Launches Ads Transparency Center As a Searchable Database

  30-03-2023 03:25 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  After launching My Ad Center last fall, Google is now introducing the Ads Transparency Center as a "searchable hub of all ads served from verified advertisers." 9to5Google reports: The Ads Transparency Center will let you view all the advertisements a company has run using Google's networks. Each ad includes the date it last ran, format (text, video, etc.), and what region (country) it was shown in: "For example, imagine you're seeing an ad for a skincare product you're interested in, but you do
  
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• Binance Concealed Ties To China For Years, Even After 2017 Crypto Crackdown, Report Finds

  30-03-2023 02:45 via slashdot.org
  
  Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao and other senior executives have been for years concealing the crypto exchange ties with China, according to documents obtained by the Financial Times. CoinTelegraph reports: In a report on March 29, FT claims that Binance had substantial ties to China for several years, contrary to the company's claims that it left the country after a 2017 ban on crypto, including an office still in use by the end of 2019 and a Chinese bank used to pay employees. "We no longer pu
  
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• ByteDance-Owned Instagram Rival Lemon8 Hits the US App Store's Top 10

  30-03-2023 02:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As U.S. lawmakers move forward with their plans for a TikTok ban or forced sale, the app's Chinese parent company ByteDance is driving another of its social platforms into the Top Charts of the U.S. App Store. ByteDance-owned app Lemon8, an Instagram rival that describes itself as a "lifestyle community," jumped into the U.S. App Store's Top Charts on Monday, becoming the No. 10 Overall app, across both apps and games. Today, it's ranked No. 9
  
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• EA Is Cutting About 800 Jobs, or 6% of Workforce, and Reducing Office Space

  30-03-2023 01:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Electronic Arts (EA) is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, and reducing office space, the video game company said Wednesday. CNBC reports: The company expects to take impairment charges ranging from $170 to $200 million, according to an SEC filing. "As we drive greater focus across our portfolio, we are moving away from projects that do not contribute to our strategy, reviewing our real estate footprint, and restructuring some of our teams," CEO Andrew Wilson wrote in a note to empl
  
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• US Court Sanctions Google For Deleting Evidence In Antitrust Cases

  30-03-2023 00:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Alphabet's Google LLC intentionally destroyed employee "chat" evidence in antitrust litigation in California and must pay sanctions and face a possible penalty at trial, a U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in his order (PDF) that Google "fell strikingly short" in its duties to preserve records. The ruling is part of a multidistrict litigation that includes a consumer class action with as many as 21 million residents; 38 states an
  
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• After Two Years, Autodesk Maya and AutoCAD Become Apple Silicon-Native

  30-03-2023 00:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its massively popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to run natively on M1 and M2 chips. The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on Autodesk's website on March 28. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflo
  
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