ICT news

• Congress Sets Limits On Staff ChatGPT Use

  26-06-2023 23:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  In a memo to House staffers this morning, the chamber's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine L. Szpindor said it is placing new guardrails around use of ChatGPT by congressional offices. Axios reports: Szpindor wrote that offices are "only authorized" to use the paid ChatGPT Plus. Unlike the free service, she said, the $20-per-month subscription version "incorporates important privacy features that are necessary to protect House data." She said in addition to other versions of ChatGPT, no othe
  
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• Twitter Hacker Who Turned Celebrity Accounts Into Crypto Shills Gets Prison Sentence

  26-06-2023 23:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the cybercriminals behind 2020's major Twitter hack was sentenced to five years in U.S. federal prison on Friday. Joseph O'Connor (AKA "PlugwalkJoe"), a 24-year-old British citizen, previously pleaded guilty to seven charges associated with the digital attack. He was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the U.S. in April of this year. In addition to the five years of jail time, O'Connor was also sentenced to three additional years u
  
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• 'Last Minute' Law Change Bid in Ireland To 'Muzzle' Critics of Data Protection Commission

  26-06-2023 22:18 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A "last-minute" government amendment to a bill is an effort to "muzzle" critics of the Data Protection Commission (DPC) and will make the commission's decision-making "even more opaque," a civil liberties group has claimed. From a report: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has urged all parties in the Dail to challenge the proposed amendment to the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2022 when it comes up for final debate on Wednesday. The amendment provides that the Commissi
  
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• Amazon Launches Local Business Delivery Network

  26-06-2023 21:12 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon plans to tap thousands of U.S. small businesses, from bodegas to florists, to deliver its packages by the end of the year. From a report: Amazon on Monday will start actively recruiting existing small businesses in 23 states including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington. At least 20 dense cities across the country, including Boston, New York
  
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• India To Cut Daytime Power Tariffs, Raise Fees For Night Use

  26-06-2023 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  India will cut tariffs for daytime power use but charge a premium when electricity demand peaks during the night, in a bid to manage surging demand and boost the use of renewable energy. From a report: The new policy, outlined by the federal power ministry, will come into effect from April 2024 for commercial and industrial consumers and a year later for most other consumers except those in the agricultural sector. It is aimed at encouraging price-sensitive consumers to run their air-conditioner
  
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• White House Announces $40 Billion in Broadband Funding

  26-06-2023 19:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  President Joe Biden is getting closer to distributing more than $40 billion in funding to support broadband expansion nationwide as part of his administration's goal to connect all Americans to high-speed internet by 2030. From a reportL: The funding, authorized in Biden's 2021 bipartisan infrastructure package, will be distributed proportionally to states based on need with each state receiving at least $100 million. Monday's allocations were made using broadband coverage maps that were recentl
  
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• Google DeepMind's CEO Says Its Next Algorithm Will Eclipse ChatGPT

  26-06-2023 18:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  In 2016, an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo from Google's DeepMind AI lab made history by defeating a champion player of the board game Go. Now Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, says his engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo to make an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be more capable than that behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. From a report: DeepMind's Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT-4,
  
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• Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Accusing Google of Stealing Millions of Song Lyrics

  26-06-2023 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media accusing Alphabet's Google of stealing millions of song lyrics. From a report: The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the suit, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by using its song lyrics in search results without attribution. It's the latest victory at the Supreme Court for Google, which earlier this year won a battle over whether its video-streaming platform YouTube can be held lia
  
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• John Goodenough, Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor and Nobel Prize Recipient, Dies

  26-06-2023 17:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  shilly writes: John B. Goodenough, professor at The University of Texas at Austin who is known around the world for the development of the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor. His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide. In 2019, Goodenough made national and international headlines after being awarded the Nobel Prize in
  
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• Turn Your Phone Off Every Night For Five Minutes, Australian PM Tells Residents

  26-06-2023 16:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Australia's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has told residents they should turn their smartphones off and on again once a day as a cybersecurity measure -- and tech experts agree. From a report: Albanese said the country needed to be proactive to thwart cyber risks, as he announced the appointment of Australia's inaugural national cybersecurity coordinator. "We need to mobilise the private sector, we need to mobilise, as well, consumers," the prime minister said on Friday. "We all have a respo
  
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• JP Morgan Accidentally Deletes Evidence in Multi-Million Record Retention Screwup

  26-06-2023 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  JP Morgan has been fined $4 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for deleting millions of email records dating from 2018 relating to its Chase Bank subsidiary. From a report: The Financial services outfit apparently deleted somewhere in the region of 47 million electronic communications records from about 8,700 electronic mailboxes covering the period January 1 through to April 23, 2018. Many of these, it turns out, were business records that were required to be retained under th
  
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• NASA Opposes Lithium Mining at Nevada Desert Site Used to Calibrate Satellites

  26-06-2023 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An ancient Nevada lakebed could become a vast source of the lithium used in electric car batteries, reports the Associated Press. But "NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead."
  At the space agency's request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles (92 square kilometers) of the easte
  
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• Paris Plans Electric Air Taxis Next Summer, More eVTOLs Predicted by 2028

  26-06-2023 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Associated Press reports from the Paris Air Show, where developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (or eVTOLs) demonstrated their surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft. And in one year the Paris region "is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer."Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by green-lighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers un
  
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• New Video Shows a Flyby of the Planet Mercury - with AI-Assisted Music

  26-06-2023 06:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte:At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the su
  
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• Linux Foundation Celebrates Zephyr Project's Small Real-Time Operating System

  26-06-2023 04:37 via news.slashdot.org
  
  This week the Linux Foundation shared an update on the Zephyr Project, a small real-time operating system for connected, resource-constrained and embedded devices:The project recently achieved several milestones including surpassing 80,000 commits since it was released in open source in 2015. This is an average of almost 2 commits per hour, which was made recently by 490 individuals, including 166 first-timers, who contributed to the 3.4 release. Zephyr RTOS supports over 450 boards running embe
  
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• 34% of AP CS Students Couldn't Solve This Java-Based 2D Array Question

  26-06-2023 03:13 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  96,000 American students took this year's [Java-based] AP Computer Science A test. And more than a third — a full 34% — missed question #4.
  It asks test-takers to write two methods for the class BoxOfCandy — one that moves a Candy object to the first row (of a column), and one that finds and returns a Candy object of a specfic flavor, removing it from the box.Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares some thoughts:- "If 34% of students are not getting any points, it's a test ques
  
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• GCC Steering Committee Announces a Code of Conduct

  26-06-2023 00:59 via news.slashdot.org
  
  GCC is the GNU project's free and open-source cross-platform compiler collection. Now an anonymous reader shared this announcement from the mailing list for GCC:
  The GCC Steering Committee has decided to adopt a Code of Conduct for interactions in GCC project spaces, including mailing lists, bugzilla, and IRC.
  The vast majority of the time, the GCC community is a very civil, cooperative space. On the rare occasions that it isn't, it's helpful to have something to point to to remind people of our
  
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