ICT news

• Real iPhone Photo Disqualified from Photography Contest, Suspected of Being AI

  15-07-2023 23:34 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader writes:A genuine picture taken on an iPhone was thrown out of a photography competition after the judges suspected that it was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
  Suzi Dougherty had captured a striking photo of her son with two smartly-dressed mannequins in an intriguing pose while visiting a Gucci exhibition. Happy with her creation, she entered it into a photo competition.
  Dougherty didn't think much more of it until a friend showed her an Instagram post declaring he
  
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• Massachusetts Considers Ban on Sales of Cellphone Location Data

  15-07-2023 22:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  "While some states have taken steps to protect cell phone information, Massachusetts could become the first state to outright ban the sale of location data from cell phones," reports WBUR:Data brokers are able to buy and sell cell phone location data to anyone with a credit card without many restrictions. "There's very little in terms of law that prevents companies from doing this, as long as they at least include somewhere in their privacy policies that this is something that they're doing," sa
  
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• Should High Schools Require a CS Course Before Students Graduate?

  15-07-2023 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:The tech-backed and directed nonprofit Code.org is back with a new call for America's Governors, announcing its "10th policy recommendation for all states." Their recommendation? "To require all students to take computer science to earn a high school diploma."
  Arguing that "artificial intelligence has increased the urgency to ensure our students are adequately prepared for a rapidly changing world," Code.org explains its vision: that states have "a policy
  
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• ChatGPT-Powered Bing Sued for Libel Over Its AI-Induced Hallucinations

  15-07-2023 20:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Reason.com:
  When people search for Jeffery Battle in Bing, they get the following (at least sometimes; this is the output of a search that I ran Tuesday):Jeffrey Battle, also known as The Aerospace Professor, is the President and CEO of Battle Enterprises, LLC, and its subsidiary The Aerospace Professor Company... Battle was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after pleading guilty to seditious conspiracy and levying war against the Uni
  
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• Nanogenerator Harvests Ocean-Wave Energy

  15-07-2023 19:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "There seem to be no limits to the ingenious ways that designers are devising to harvest energy or take existing approaches and exploit and enhance them," writes the site Electronic Design:A research team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed a contact-separation mode triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with a simple structure for harvesting wave energy and powering marine sensors and transmitters.Although this isn't the first cylindrical TENG (C-TENG) — several
  
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• Driverless Taxis are Causing More 'Disruptions', San Francisco Officials Complain

  15-07-2023 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  After a severe rainstorm, two Cruise robotaxis drove past several downed trees and power lines, and then through caution tape, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. And then one of the Cruise vehicles caught on a low-hanging power wire for the city's bus system, "dragging it upward the rest of the block."
  The article notes that the transit agency "had already de-energized the lines by the time the Cruise taxi hit them." But the cars only stopped "after driving through another set of caution tape
  
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• Red Hat's Decision Prompts Outrage and Sympathy, Called 'Necessary' and 'Embarrassing'

  15-07-2023 17:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  SiliconANGLE reports that Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources "has sparked outrage in some circles," but observers contacted by the publication "were mostly sympathetic" to Red Hat's position:Most acknowledged that the company's explanation that it couldn't keep funding the development of software that competitors then gave away for free was reasonable. But not Bill Ottman, founder and chief executive officer of Minds Inc., a social network built on open-source code." They are com
  
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• US Announces $39 Billion in New Student Debt Relief

  15-07-2023 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The Biden administration announced Friday that 804,000 borrowers will have their student debt wiped away, totaling $39 billion worth of debt, in the coming weeks..." reports CNN.
  That's an average of $48,507 per borrower, each of whom has "been paying down their debts for 20 years or more and should qualify for relief," according to a statement from the administrationFriday's action addresses "historical failures" and administrative errors that miscounted qualifying payments made by borrowers,
  
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• Age of Universe Nearly Twice As Old As Previously Believed

  15-07-2023 15:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called "impossible early galaxy problem." "Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated," says author Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of
  
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• Congress Prepares To Continue Throwing Money At NASA's Space Launch System

  15-07-2023 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Congress will pour billions more dollars into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its associated architecture, even as NASA science missions remain vulnerable to cuts. TechCrunch reports: Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees recommend earmarking around $25 billion for NASA for the next fiscal year (FY 24), which is in line with the amount of funding the agency received this year (FY 23). However, both branches of Congress recommend increasing the portion of that funding that
  
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• Researchers Discover Stardust Sprinkled On a Nearby Asteroid

  15-07-2023 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers have discovered that samples of the Ryugu asteroid gathered in 2019 contain grains of stardust. NPR reports: The dust, which came from distant stars and drifted through space for millions or billions of years, could provide clues about how the solar system formed, according to Ann Nguyen, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Stars forged nearly all of the elements of the Universe. Many of the atoms that make up our bodies were themselves made inside of the
  
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• New Tinnitus Therapy Can Quiet Torturous Ringing In the Ears

  15-07-2023 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Constant buzzing and ringing in the ears without any input from the external environment can seriously impair quality of life for the 10 percent of the U.S. population with severe tinnitus. A combination treatment using sound and electrical stimulation may now give hope to sufferers. One cause of tinnitus is probably overactivity of the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) in the brain stem. This is where acoustic signals are processed with
  
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• FDA Says Aspartame Is Safe, Disagreeing With WHO's Cancer Link

  15-07-2023 03:25 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disagrees with the World Health Organization's recent assessment that aspartame possibly causes cancer in humans. "Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives in the human food supply. FDA scientists do not have safety concerns when aspartame is used under the approved conditions," an agency spokesperson said. CNBC reports: The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a WHO body, found a possible link between aspartame and a type of liver c
  
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• Federal HQ Buildings Only Used At 25% of Capacity

  15-07-2023 02:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  dcblogs writes: According to federal officials at a U.S. House hearing Thursday, the monumental federal buildings in Washington are largely empty, with some agencies using 25% or less of their headquarters' building capacity on average. The government owns some 511 million of square feet of office space, and capacity problems open the door to the possibility of conversions to housing or commercial uses. Commercial reuse has happened before. In 2013, the General Services Administration leased the
  
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• Internet Archive Targets Book DRM Removal Tool With DMCA Takedown

  15-07-2023 02:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers. TorrentFreak reports: The Internet Archive sent a takedown request to GitHub, requesting the developer platform to remove a tool that circumvents i
  
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• Meta To Release Open-Source Commercial AI Model To Compete With OpenAI, Google

  15-07-2023 01:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is set to release a commercial version of LLaMA, its open-source large language model (LLM) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate text, images, and code. LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, was publicly announced in February as a small foundational model, and made available to researchers and academics. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that Meta is prepared to release the commerc
  
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• AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL

  15-07-2023 00:40 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phoronix: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do. Benny Vasquez, Chair of the Board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, wrote in a blog post yesterday: After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided t
  
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• One of Reddit's Biggest Communities Is Suggesting Users Move To Discord

  15-07-2023 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  r/malefashionadvice, one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private as part of the Reddit protest, is encouraging its users to move to Discord and Substack. The subreddit has more than 5 million subscribers. The Verge reports: Specifically, the Discord lets members of the community chat amongst themselves and post about things like fits and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a lot of guides. "One of the other mods writes "I will never go back, it's way better on Discord,' and that
  
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