ICT news

• FIFA Used AI to Identify 300 People Harassing World Cup Players, Notified Law Enforcement

  18-06-2023 23:09 via slashdot.org
  
  The Associated Press reports:A project using artificial intelligence to track social media abuse aimed at players at the 2022 World Cup identified more than 300 people whose details are being given to law enforcement, FIFA said Sunday.
  The people made "abusive, discriminatory, or threatening posts [or] comments" on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, soccer's governing body said in a report detailing efforts to protect players and officials during the tournament play
  
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• California's First Solar-Powered Microgrid Neighborhood Has a Giant Community Battery

  18-06-2023 22:09 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  As part of a series of articles on smart homes, the Verge visits an energy-efficient home in the southern California desert that's "part of California's first planned smart, solar-powered residential microgrid community."
  A surprisingly small number of solar panels on the roof soak up the sun in the desert landscape... funneling power into the tightly designed building envelope. Here, a 13-kilowatt hour home battery sits beside a smart load panel that controls every electrical appliance in the h
  
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• A Finnish Firm Thinks It Can Cut Industrial Carbon Emissions By a Third

  18-06-2023 20:36 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The Ecoomist asks: How can we "green" the high-temperature chemical processes in industries like steelmaking or the production of chemical or cement. "Because it is tricky or impossible to produce such temperatures for some industrial processes using electricity alone, firms rely on fossil fuels."
  But a Finnish engineering firm called Coolbrook thinks they have an answer:
  The easiest way to think about Coolbrook's system is as a gas turbine in reverse. A conventional gas turbine — as used
  
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• Is AI Making Silicon Valley Rich on Other People's Work?

  18-06-2023 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader rtfa0987 spotted this on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. "Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people's products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings.Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories,
  
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• Researchers Argue Earth Formed Much Faster Than Believed, Suggest More Planets Could Have Water

  18-06-2023 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes this report from the Washington Post:
  In a new study released in Nature this week, researchers state that Earth formed within just 3 million years. That's notably faster than previous estimates placing the timeline up to 100 million years.... "We can also predict that if other planets formed ... by the same mechanism, then the ingredients required for life such as water, should be present on other planets and other systems, so there's a greater chance that we have wate
  
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• Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue -- Because of AI

  18-06-2023 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "I predict that Generative Artificial Intelligence is going to go a long way toward keeping Moore's Law in force," writes long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely, "and the way this is going to happen says a lot about the chip business, global economics, and Artificial Intelligence, itself."The current el cheapo AI research frenzy is likely to subside as LLaMA ages into obsolescence and has to be replaced by something more expensive, putting Google, Microsoft and OpenAI back in control. Understa
  
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• Is Reddit Dying?

  18-06-2023 16:33 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb).
  "[A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Redd
  
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• Working-from-Home May Start an Office Real Estate Crisis - But Banks May Adapt

  18-06-2023 13:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post reports that "Since the pandemic, employers — particularly in major cities — have been struggling to get their workers to return to the office, while others have given up and allowed workers to go fully remote.
  "That trend is finally starting to catch up with the owners of office buildings in the form of rising vacancy rates and declining property values."Earlier this month, real estate data provider Trepp reported that an estimated $270 billion in commercial bank
  
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• What Happens When You Ask Alexa if Amazon is a Monopoly?

  18-06-2023 09:34 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:Ask Amazon's digital assistant, "Hey, Alexa, is Amazon a monopoly?" and it will profess ignorance.
  "Hmm, I don't know that one," it answers.
  But ask about any of the other tech giants' business practices, and it's ready to critique them. Surfacing answers from across the internet, Alexa describes Apple as an "oligopoly" and cites Alphabet's Google as violating privacy rights, according to Bloomberg News tests of the software on three devices.
  
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• A New Approach to Computation Reimagines Artificial Intelligence: Hyperdimensional Computing

  18-06-2023 06:57 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Quanta magazine thinks there's a better alternative to the artificial neural networks (or ANNs) powering AI systems. (Alternate URL)For one, ANNs are "super power-hungry," said Cornelia Fermüller, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. "And the other issue is [their] lack of transparency." Such systems are so complicated that no one truly understands what they're doing, or why they work so well. This, in turn, makes it almost impossible to get them to reason by analogy, which i
  
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• Windows 11 Update Breaks Chrome for Some Antivirus Software Users

  18-06-2023 03:57 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wednesday BleepingComputer reported:
  Malwarebytes confirmed today that the Windows 11 22H2 KB5027231 cumulative update released this Patch Tuesday breaks Google Chrome on its customers' systems... While uninstalling the KB5027231 update fixes the issue, admins report that it's not possible to do so via Windows Server Update Services because of a "catastrophic error..." The Google Chrome process is actually running but is prevented from fully launching the application and loading the user interfa
  
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• Why EVs Won't Crash the Electric Grid

  18-06-2023 00:57 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "If everyone has an electric car, will the electric grid be able to support all those cars being recharged?"That's the question being answered this week in the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" newsletter:We can already see a preview of our electric future in Norway, one of the countries with the highest share of EVs. More than 90 percent of new cars sold in the country were plug-in electric, according to the latest data, from May. More than 20 percent of the country's overall vehicle fleet is e
  
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