ICT news

• After 18 Years, Europe's Largest Nuclear Reactor Starts Regular Output

  16-04-2023 23:21 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Finland finally began regular output Sunday from its first new nuclear power plant in more than four decades. Reuters reports that the Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor is also Europe's first new nuclear plant in 16 years. Construction started in 2005, with the plant due to open four years later — but it was then "plagued by technical issues" which continued to the very end.
  OL3 first supplied test production to Finland's national power grid in March last year and was expected at the time
  
  Read more

• Utah's Record Snowfall 'Buys Us Time' for Drying Great Salt Lake

  16-04-2023 22:21 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Utah's Great Salt Lake had shrunk by two thirds its original size, the New York Times reported last June. And "It was only three months ago that nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists sounded the alarm that the Great Salt Lake in Utah faces 'unprecedented danger'," CNN reports. "Unless the state's lawmakers fast-tracked 'emergency measures' to dramatically increase the lake's inflow by 2024, it would likely disappear in the next five years."
  Now, after an incredible winter full of ra
  
  Read more

• Leaked Documents Show Russians Boasted Just 1% of Fake Social Profiles are Detected

  16-04-2023 21:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known," reports the Washington Post, "boosting lies about Ukraine's military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.
  "The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says."
  That
  
  Read more

• EFF Warns US 'Deserves Stronger Spyware Protections Than Biden's Executive Order'

  16-04-2023 19:51 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  In March U.S. President Joe Biden "signed an executive order that limits U.S. government agencies from using commercially available spyware," writes EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia.
  "But that doesn't mean there will be no government use of spyware in the United States...."The executive order arrived only days before revelations that the United States, which was previously thought to have steered clear of some of the most infamous foreign spyware products, actually had a contract to t
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Solar Projects in North Africa + Undersea Cables = Green Energy for Europe?

  16-04-2023 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "The abundant sun of northern Africa may soon power Europe's homes and businesses," reports the Washington Post, "as European leaders consider connecting massive North African solar projects to undersea power cables to free their continent from Russian energy."The projects would take advantage of the climate quirk that one side of the Mediterranean is far drearier and cloudier than the other, although Europe and North Africa are geographically close. Abundant desert land also makes North African
  
  Read more

• Would This OpenJDK Proposal Make Java Easier to Learn?

  16-04-2023 17:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  "Java would become easier for students to learn under a proposal to introduce flexible main methods and anonymous main classes to the language," reports InfoWorld.
  Details of the plan include enhancing the protocol by which Java programs are launched to be flexible, in particular to allow the String[] parameter of main methods to be omitted and allow main methods to be neither public nor static; the Hello World program would be simplified. Anonymous main classes would be introduced to make the c
  
  Read more

• New Spectre-Related 'Medium Severity' Flaw Patched in Linux Kernel

  16-04-2023 16:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  "The Spectre vulnerability that has haunted hardware and software makers since 2018 continues to defy efforts to bury it," reports the Register:On Thursday, Eduardo (sirdarckcat) Vela Nava, from Google's product security response team, disclosed a Spectre-related flaw in version 6.2 of the Linux kernel. The bug, designated medium severity, was initially reported to cloud service providers — those most likely to be affected — on December 31, 2022, and was patched in Linux on February
  
  Read more

• Remote Working Increases VC Investments in Other Areas Besides Silicon Valley

  16-04-2023 13:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Silicon Valley had $74.9 billion in venture-capital investments just in 2022, reports the Washington Post (citing data from PitchBook). With 3,206 deals, "that's about $45.36 billion and 1,058 deals more than New York, the second highest region for VC fundraising." And in addition, the Silicon Valley region "was also the home of 86% of start-ups, up from 53% last year, funded by famed start-up accelerator Y Combinator."
  And yet Silicon Valley's share of U.S. venture capital investments last year
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• FSF Says Google's Decision to Deprecate JPEG-XL Emphasizes Need for Browser Choice

  16-04-2023 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards," argues FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough (while adding that Firefox, "through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold.")
  "Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally."Part o
  
  Read more

• Undercutting Microsoft, Amazon Offers Free Access to Its AI Coding Assistant 'CodeWhisperer'

  16-04-2023 06:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon is making its AI-powered coding assistant CodeWhisperer free for individual developers, reports the Verge, "undercutting the $10 per month pricing of its Microsoft-made rival."Amazon launched CodeWhisperer as a preview last year, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt....
  CodeWhisperer automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unf
  
  Read more

• Germany Quits Nuclear Power, Closes Its Final Three Plants

  16-04-2023 03:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Germany's final three nuclear power plants close their doors on Saturday," reports CNN, "marking the end of the country's nuclear era that has spanned more than six decades...."
  [D]espite last-minute calls to keep the plants online amid an energy crisis, the German government has been steadfast. "The position of the German government is clear: nuclear power is not green. Nor is it sustainable," Steffi Lemke, Germany's Federal Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection and a Green Part
  
  Read more

• Should Managers Permanently Stop Requiring Degrees for IT Positions?

  16-04-2023 00:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  CIO magazine reports on "a growing number of managers and executives dropping degree requirements from job descriptions."Figures from the 2022 study The Emerging Degree Reset from The Burning Glass Institute quantify the trend, reporting that 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets between 2017 and 2019. Moreover, researchers calculated that 63% of those changes appear to be "'structural resets' representing a measured and potentially permanent sh
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!