ICT news

• China Makes Major Push in Its Ambitious Digital Yuan Project

  24-04-2023 23:21 via slashdot.org
  
  Public sector workers in an eastern Chinese city are set to be paid fully in digital yuan, as the country makes a significant push to popularize the currency. From a report: Changshu, located in the province of Jiangsu, will start the new payment process in May, according to an official document widely posted on government websites. This is the biggest rollout of the currency, also known as the e-CNY, in China so far, according to state media. Government employees as well as staff at state-owned
  
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• Google Authenticator Can Now Sync 2FA Codes To the Cloud

  24-04-2023 22:41 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google Authenticator just got an update that should make it more useful for people who frequently use the service to sign in to apps and websites. From a report: As of today, Google Authenticator will now sync any one-time two-factor authentication (2FA) codes that it generates to users' Google Accounts. Previously, one-time Authenticator codes were stored locally, on a single device, meaning losing that device often meant losing the ability to sign in to any service set up with Authenticator's
  
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• The North Seas Can Be the World's Biggest Power Plant

  24-04-2023 22:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Alexander De Croo (the prime minister of Belgium), Mark Rutte (the prime minister of the Netherlands), Xavier Bettel (the prime minister of Luxembourg), Emmanuel Macron (the president of France), Olaf Scholz (the chancellor of Germany), Leo Varadkar (the prime minister of Ireland), Jonas Gahr Store (the prime minister of Norway), Rishi Sunak (the prime minister of the United Kingdom), and Mette Frederiksen (the prime minister of Denmark), writing at Politico: We need offshore wind turbines -- an
  
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• Microsoft Agrees To Stop Bundling Teams With Office

  24-04-2023 21:22 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices, in a move designed to prevent an official antitrust probe by EU regulators. From a report: The US tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, said two people with direct knowledge of the decision, following a 2020 complaint by rival Slack which claimed Microsoft's practice of bundling the two services to
  
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• New BIOS Updates Attempt To Keep Ryzen 7000X3D Processors From Frying Themselves

  24-04-2023 20:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, users on Reddit and YouTube began posting about problems with AMD's newest Ryzen 7000X3D processors. In some cases, the systems simply stopped booting. But in at least one instance, a Ryzen 7800X3D became physically deformed, bulging out underneath and bending the pins on the motherboard's processor socket. In a separate post, motherboard maker MSI indicated that the damage "may have been caused by abnormal voltage issues." Ryzen 7000X3D pro
  
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• Apple App Store Policies Upheld by Court in Antitrust Challenge Brought by Epic Games

  24-04-2023 20:05 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple won an appeals court ruling upholding its App Store's policies in an antitrust challenge brought by Epic Games. From a report: Monday's ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower-court judge's 2021 decision largely rejecting claims by Epic, the maker of Fortnite, that Apple's online marketplace policies violated federal law because they ban third-party app marketplaces on its operating system. The appeals panel upheld the judge's ruling in Epic's favor on California s
  
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• Snapchat Sees Spike in 1-star Reviews as Users Pan 'My AI' Feature

  24-04-2023 19:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The early user reviews for Snapchat's "My AI" feature are in -- and they're not good. From a report: Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat's new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app's Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get instant responses. But following the chatbot's rollout to Snapchat's wider community, Snapchat's app has seen a spike in negative reviews amid a growing number of co
  
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• Google Opens Its Security Tools To Competitors' Platforms

  24-04-2023 18:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is leaning into flexibility as part of a new strategy to stymie the impact of belt-tightening among cyber chiefs. From a report: Google Cloud and Mandiant, the threat intelligence unit it acquired last year, unveiled at the RSA Conference in San Francisco today that they're opening their security products to integrations from competitors, as well as offering new Google plug-ins for other vendors' tools. The news, which was shared first with Axios, means that Google customers will now have
  
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• Supreme Court Rejects Computer Scientist's Lawsuit Over AI-Generated Inventions

  24-04-2023 18:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his AI system created. From a report: The justices turned away Thaler's appeal of a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated. Thaler founded Imagination Engines Inc, an advanc
  
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• Supreme Court To Decide if Public Officials Can Block Critics on Social Media

  24-04-2023 17:26 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. Supreme Court, exploring free speech rights in the social media era, on Monday agreed to consider whether the Constitution's First Amendment bars government officials from blocking their critics on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The justices took up an appeal by two members of a public school board from the city of Poway in Southern California of a lower court's ruling in favor of school parents who sued after being blocked from Facebook pages and a Twitter account
  
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• YouTube Case at US Supreme Court Could Shape Protections for ChatGPT and AI

  24-04-2023 16:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  When the U.S. Supreme Court decides in the coming months whether to weaken a powerful shield protecting internet companies, the ruling also could have implications for rapidly developing technologies like artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. From a report: The justices are due to rule by the end of June whether Alphabet's YouTube can be sued over its video recommendations to users. That case tests whether a U.S. law that protects technology platforms from legal responsibility for content pos
  
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• Hacker Group Names Are Now Absurdly Out of Control

  24-04-2023 16:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Hackers, particularly state-sponsored and organized cybercriminals, wreak havoc worldwide. However, their aliases, such as Fancy Bear and Refined Kitten, often undermine the seriousness of their actions, Wired argues. Microsoft's cybersecurity division recently revamped its naming taxonomy for the hundreds of hacker groups it tracks, adopting two-word names with a weather-based term to indicate the hackers' suspected country and affiliation.
  For instance, the Iranian group Phosphorous is now dub
  
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• How China Censored Research About Covid-19

  24-04-2023 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it...
  "What is now clear is that the study was n
  
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• Amazon's Vow to Stop Squeezing Its Sellers Was Fake, Says California's Lawsuit

  24-04-2023 09:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this recent report from Bloomberg:Amazon continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended its policy that artificially inflated prices for consumers, according to newly unsealed filings in California's antitrust lawsuit against the e-commerce giant.
  The Seattle-based company planned to expand penalties on sellers who presented lower prices outside Amazon, even after it claimed in 2019 that it stopped pu
  
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• Amazon's Vow to Stop Squeezing Its Seller Was Fake, Says California's Lawsuit

  24-04-2023 09:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this recent report from Bloomberg:Amazon continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended its policy that artificially inflated prices for consumers, according to newly unsealed filings in California's antitrust lawsuit against the e-commerce giant.
  The Seattle-based company planned to expand penalties on sellers who presented lower prices outside Amazon, even after it claimed in 2019 that it stopped pu
  
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• An Enormous Animatronic Dragon Caught on Fire at Disneyland

  24-04-2023 05:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Thousands of stunned guests were on hand Saturday night to watch a Disneyland malfunction for the ages," writes SFGate — when a 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon burst into flames, and continued burning for several minutes in front of the stunned crowd.
  SFGate reports:
  The fire occurred during the 10:30 p.m. performance of Fantasmic, a show staged on the Rivers of America. The elaborate show uses ships, barges, projections on the water and fire effects to tell the story of Mickey Mouse's dr
  
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• Python's PyPI Will Sell 'Organization Accounts' to Corporate Projects to Fund Staff

  24-04-2023 03:37 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Last year Python's massive PyPI repository of pre-written software packages had 235.7 billion downloads — a 57% annual growth in its download counts and bandwidth. So now Python's nonprofit Python Software Foundation has an announcement.Their director of infrastructure said today that they're rolling out "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI, while simultaneously giving our users one of our most requested features: organization accounts
  
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• Another Ocean Climate Solution Attempted by California Researchers

  24-04-2023 01:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Associated Press visited a 100-foot barge moored in Los Angeles where engineers built "a kind of floating laboratory to answer a simple question: Is there a way to cleanse seawater of carbon dioxide and then return it to the ocean so it can suck more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to slow global warming?"The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean's natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant
  
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• Cloud Profits May Be Slowing at Microsoft and Amazon

  24-04-2023 00:04 via slashdot.org
  
  "Once-booming demand for cloud-computing services is slowing..." reports Bloomberg. "When Microsoft and Amazon report results next week, analysts are anticipating the slowest revenue growth for their cloud-computing businesses since the firms started breaking out performance last decade."For years, demand for cloud-computing services has steadily driven growth at both Microsoft and Amazon... Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud unit, which is home to its Azure cloud-services business, accounted for 38%
  
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