ICT news

• Researchers Find 'Backdoor' in Encrypted Police and Military Radios

  24-07-2023 21:42 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A group of cybersecurity researchers has uncovered what they believe is an intentional backdoor in encrypted radios used by police, military, and critical infrastructure entities around the world. The backdoor may have existed for decades, potentially exposing a wealth of sensitive information transmitted across them, according to the researchers. From a report: While the researchers frame their discovery as a backdoor, the organization responsible for maintaining the standard pushes back agains
  
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• Google Owes $338.7 Million in Chromecast Patent Case, US Jury Says

  24-07-2023 20:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Alphabet's Google violated a software developer's patent rights with its remote-streaming technology and must pay $338.7 million in damages, a federal jury in Waco, Texas decided on Friday. From a report: The jury found that Google's Chromecast and other devices infringe patents owned by Touchstream Technologies related to streaming videos from one screen to another. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said on Monday that the company will appeal the verdict and has "always developed technology in
  
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• Flip Phones Are Having a Moment

  24-07-2023 19:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  What's old is hot again, and flip phones are so very hot right now. From a report: These phones are a far cry from the phone that you mastered T9 texting on in college. Today's flip phones are garden-variety 2023 smartphones that happen to fold in half -- plus a screen on the front cover. They've been making a kind of comeback over the past few years, but until now, they've existed in the shadows of their bigger, pricier fold-style counterparts. That's understandable, considering that their smal
  
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• Spotify Hikes Prices of Premium Plans

  24-07-2023 18:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  In its latest attempt to boost revenue and cut losses, Spotify unveiled a widely telegraphed move to raise prices for its premium paying subscriber base. From a report: The new monthly cost for U.S. users will be $10.99, the company said. The hike brings Spotify in line with rivals Apple Music ($10.99 a month) and Amazon Music ($10.99, though cheaper for Prime members), which both raised prices last year. Slightly cheaper: YouTube Music ($9.99 a month), which has steadily built a major presence
  
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• Android's Now Better Than iOS, Instagram Boss Says

  24-07-2023 18:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Which is better: iPhone or Android? Instagram head Adam Mosseri weighed in on the topic earlier this week, reigniting a debate that has waged on since the dawn of smartphones. From a report:
  "Android's now better than iOS," Mosseri posted in response to tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, who had asked for people's best tech "hot takes." Mosseri didn't get into why he felt Android to be superior, but his use of the words "now better" implies that he may have previously felt Apple's iOS ha
  
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• Sam Altman's Worldcoin Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Project Launches

  24-07-2023 17:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Worldcoin, Sam Altman's audacious eyeball-scanning crypto startup, has started the global rollout of its services to help build a reliable solution for "distinguishing humans from AI online," enable "global democratic processes" and "drastically increase economic opportunity." From a report: The startup, which has raised about $250 million altogether and counts Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Reid Hoffman among its backers, said it's rolling out its identity technology as well as the to
  
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• Rental Cars Are the New Airbnb

  24-07-2023 16:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Do-it-yourselfers want a piece of the rental-car market. Small-time entrepreneurs are amassing vehicles to rent out through car-sharing services such as Turo and Getaround, or their own websites. From a report: They aim to take on giants including Hertz and Avis Budget -- assuming they can master the difficult logistics of the business. One owner said he had to retrieve a car that was stolen, driven all the way up the West Coast and abandoned at the Canadian border. Another rented out a car that
  
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• Norway Government Ministries Hit By Cyber Attack

  24-07-2023 16:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Twelve Norwegian government ministries have been hit by a cyber attack, the Norwegian government said on Monday, the latest attack to hit the public sector of Europe's largest gas supplier and NATO's northernmost member. From a report: "We identified a weakness in the platform of one of our suppliers. That weakness has now been shut," Erik Hope, head of the government agency in charge of providing services to ministries, told a news conference. The attack was identified due to "unusual" traffic
  
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• Ivanti Releases Security Updates for Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) CVE-2023-35078

  24-07-2023 14:00 via cisa.gov
  A vulnerability discovered in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM, previously branded MobileIron Core) allows unauthenticated access to specific API paths. An attacker with access to these API paths can access personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, phone numbers, and other mobile device details for users on a vulnerable system. An attacker can also make other configuration changes, including creating an EPMM administrative account that can make further changes to a vulnerable
  
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• Is AI Training on Libraries of Pirated Books?

  24-07-2023 13:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The New York Times points out that so-called "shadow libraries," like Library Genesis, Z-Library or Bibliotik, "are obscure repositories storing millions of titles, in many cases without permission — and are often used as A.I. training data."A.I. companies have acknowledged in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI's GPT-1 was trained on BookCorpus, which has over 7,000 unpublished titles scraped from the self-publishing platform Smashwords. To train GPT-3, OpenAI said
  
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• US Pulls Authorization for Lithium Exploration Project in Southern Nevada, Citing Wildlife

  24-07-2023 09:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Tuesday North America's largest lithium mining operation cleared its last legal hurdle in federal appeals court, giving a green light to the mining of 6,000 acres in an 18,000-acre project site near Nevada's northern border.
  But meanwhile, in Southern Nevada...Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company's lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada after conservationists sought a court order to block it.
  T
  
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• AI Watches Millions of Cars and Tells Cops if You Might Be a Criminal

  24-07-2023 06:54 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Forbes' senior writer on cybersecurity writes on the "warrantless monitoring of citizens en masse" in the United States.
  Here's how county police armed with a "powerful new AI tool" identified the suspicious driving pattern of a grey Chevy owned by David Zayas:
  Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas' car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Depa
  
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• Sixth 'Hutter Prize' Awarded for Achieving New Data Compression Milestone

  24-07-2023 04:19 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Since 2006, Slashdot has been covering a contest CmdrTaco once summarized as "Compress Wikipedia and Win." It rewards progress on compressing a 1-billion-character excerpt of Wikipedia — approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.And today a new record was announced. The 1 billion characters have now been compressed to just 114,156,155 bytes — about 114 megabytes, or just 11.41% of the original size — by Saurabh Kumar, a New York-based quantitative developer f
  
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• Workers Complain AI is Actually Increasing the 'Intensity' of Their Work

  24-07-2023 00:49 via slashdot.org
  
  Editor/publisher Neil Clarke "said he recently had to temporarily shutter the online submission form for his science fiction and fantasy magazine, Clarkesworld," reports CNN, "after his team was inundated with a deluge of 'consistently bad' AI-generated submissions.""They're some of the worst stories we've seen, actually," Clarke said of the hundreds of pieces of AI-produced content he and his team of humans now must manually parse through. "But it's more of the problem of volume, not quality. T
  
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