ICT news

• Millions Snap up New Germany-wide Public Transit Ticket

  01-05-2023 23:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Public transit companies in Germany say more than 3 million people have already snapped up a new ticket being launched Monday that allows them to use all local and regional trains, buses and metros across the country for 49 euros ($53.90) a month. From a report: The new Germany Ticket is intended to encourage people to ditch their cars in favor of more environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It follows on from an experimental 9-euro 'all you can ride' ticket that proved to be success l
  
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• Film Studios Lose Bid To Unmask Reddit Users Who Wrote Comments on Piracy

  01-05-2023 22:41 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. From a report: US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online. The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US distric
  
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• Apple Releases Its First Rapid-Fire Security Updates for iPhone, iPad and Mac

  01-05-2023 22:01 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple promised faster turnaround times for security patches with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, and it's now delivering on that claim. From a report: The company has released its first Rapid Security Response updates for devices running iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1. They're available through Software Update as usual, but are small downloads that don't require much time to install. MacRumors says the fix is deploying over the course of 48 hours, so don't be surprised if you have to wait
  
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• People Put Nearly $1 Billion Into Apple Savings Accounts in First 4 Days

  01-05-2023 21:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it's good to be the banker as well as a player. From a report: A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account. While the company had previously seen success with its mobile payments platform, the new savings account is already doing gangbusters. After the Cupertino tech giant launched its
  
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• White House To Study Employer Tools That Monitor Workers

  01-05-2023 20:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Biden administration plans to study companies' use of technology to monitor and manage workers, which it said on Monday is becoming increasingly common and can cause "serious risks to workers." From a report: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a blog post, sought comments from employees about their experience with surveillance technology, and asked employers and software vendors how they develop and use them. "While these technologies can benefit both workers and emp
  
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• AI Chatbots Have Been Used To Create Dozens of News Content Farms

  01-05-2023 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. From a report:The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names like News Live 79 and Daily Business Post, while others share lifestyle tips, celebrity news
  
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• 'Super Mario Bros. Movie' Tops $1 Billion Globally, Highest-Grosser Ever For a Film Based on a Video Game

  01-05-2023 19:20 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dom
  
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• Satellite Data Reveal 20,000 Previously Unknown Deep-Sea Mountains

  01-05-2023 18:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of mar
  
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• Geoffrey Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI', Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

  01-05-2023 18:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growi
  
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• The Kingdom Of Bhutan Has Been Quietly Mining Bitcoin For Years

  01-05-2023 17:20 via slashdot.org
  
  The Himalayan kingdom confirmed it has been running a bitcoin mining operation as mystery surrounds the scale of its earlier cryptocurrency investments. From a report: Beneath the Himalayas, rivers fed by ancient glaciers supply the tiny kingdom of Bhutan with immense stores of hydroelectricity. The renewable resource has become an economic engine, accounting for 30% of the country's gross domestic product, and fueling the homes of nearly all of its 800,000 residents. But for the past few years,
  
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• ChatGPT Will See You Now: Doctors Using AI To Answer Patient Questions

  01-05-2023 16:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health
  
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• JPMorgan Snaps Up First Republic's Assets in US Auction

  01-05-2023 15:09 via news.slashdot.org
  
  JPMorgan said on Monday it will buy most of First Republic Bank's assets after regulators seized the troubled lender at the weekend, marking the third failure of a major U.S. bank in two months. From a report: Under the deal, which came after an auction, JPMorgan will pay $10.6 billion to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) for most of the assets of the San Francisco-based bank, whose failure is the largest since Washington Mutual in 2008. JPMorgan, already the biggest bank in the Uni
  
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• CISA Urges Organizations to Incorporate the FCC Covered List Into Risk Management Plans

  01-05-2023 14:00 via cisa.gov
  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) maintains a Covered List of communications equipment and services that have been determined by the U.S. government to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons to national security pursuant to the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019.
  As the 6th annual National Supply Chain Integrity Month concludes, CISA reminds all critical infrastructure owners a
  
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• Researchers Build World's First Wooden Transistor

  01-05-2023 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:
  Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences
  
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• Are Public Wifi and Phone Chargers Actually Safe?

  01-05-2023 09:44 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter suggests some "tech fears you can stop worrying about." And it starts by reasuring readers, "You're fine using the WiFi in a coffee shop, hotel or airport."Yes, it is safe," said Chester Wisniewski, a digital security specialist with the firm Sophos. Five or 10 years ago, it wasn't secure to use the shared WiFi in a coffee shop or another place outside your home. But now, most websites and apps scramble whatever you do online. That makes it tough fo
  
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• The People Turning Time Into a Currency

  01-05-2023 06:59 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tui
  
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• 'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety

  01-05-2023 04:03 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Phoronix reports:With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security."[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project:
  It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safet
  
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• Google Has More Powerful AI, Says Engineer Fired Over Sentience Claims

  01-05-2023 02:03 via slashdot.org
  
  Remember that Google engineer/AI ethicist who was fired last summer after claiming their LaMDA LLM had become sentient?
  In a new interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine now says the "best way forward" for humankind's future relationship with AI is "understanding that we are dealing with intelligent artifacts. There's a chance that — and I believe it is the case — that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when
  
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