ICT news

• Will Quantum Computing Supercharge AI - and Then Transform Our Understanding of Reality?

  13-08-2023 22:15 via slashdot.org
  
  Quantum computing could turbo-charge AI into something "massively, universally transformative," argues the South China Morning Post, citing a quote from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs..."
  "AI will give us the ability to create learning machines that can begin to mimic human abilities, while quantum computers may provide the calculational power to finally create an intelligent
  
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• Judge Finally Clears Way for Apple's $500 Million iPhone Throttling Settlement

  13-08-2023 20:34 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  "Owners of some older iPhone models are expected to receive about $65 each," reports SiliconValley.com, "after a judge cleared the way for payments in a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of secretly throttling phone performance."The Cupertino cell phone giant agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it had perpetrated "one of the largest consumer frauds in history" by surreptitiously slowing the performance of certain iPhone models to address problems with batteri
  
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• The Untold History of Today's Russian-Speaking Hackers

  13-08-2023 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Monday sees the release of "The Billion Dollar Heist," a documentary about the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, considered the biggest cyber-heist of all time. The film's executive producer wrote the book Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia (and is also a rector at the Institute for Human Sciences).
  But he's also written an article for the Financial Times outlining the complicated background of Russian-speaking hacker gangs responsible for malware and ransomware, starting
  
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• Why Was Silicon Valley So Obsessed with LK-99 Superconductor Claims?

  13-08-2023 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  What to make of the news that early research appears unable to duplicate the much-ballyhooed claims for the LK99 superconductor?
  "The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..."[M]any tec
  
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• Common Alzheimer's Disease Gene May Have Helped Our Ancestors Have More Kids

  13-08-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Science magazine reports:Roughly one in five people are born with at least one copy of a gene variant called APOE4 that makes them more prone to heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in old age. That the variant is so common poses an evolutionary mystery: If it decreases our fitness, why hasn't APOE4 been purged from the human population over time?
  Now, a study of nearly 800 women in a traditional society in the Amazon finds that those with the disease-promoting variant had slightly more childre
  
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• How to Turn an Asteroid into a Space Habitat (Using Self-Replicating Spider Robots)

  13-08-2023 16:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A retired Technical Fellow from Rockwell Collins "released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat," reports Universe Today (in an article republished at Science Alert):
  Dr. David W. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories — asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use)... He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal hab
  
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• As Privacy Policies Get Harder to Understand, Many Allow Companies to Copy Your Content

  13-08-2023 13:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this investigative report from The Markup:
  Over the past quarter-century, privacy policies — the lengthy, dense legal language you quickly scroll through before mindlessly hitting "agree" — have grown both longer and denser. A study released last year found that not only did the average length of a privacy policy quadruple between 1996 and 2021, they also became considerably more difficult to understand. "Analyzing the content of privacy policies, we identi
  
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• Should There Be an 'Official' Version of Linux?

  13-08-2023 09:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution:
  Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor?Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to ta
  
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• Google's Chrome Begins Supporting Post-Quantum Key Agreement to Shield Encryption Keys

  13-08-2023 07:24 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography," writes Chrome's technical program manager for security, Devon O'Brien.
  "Continuing with our strategy for handling this major transition, we are updating technical standards, testing and deploying new quantum-resistant algorithms, and working with the broader ecosystem to help ensure this effort is a success."As a step down this path, Chrome will begin supporting X25519Kyber768 for estab
  
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• Microsoft Spotted 15 High-Security Vulnerabilities in Industrial SDK Used by Power Plants

  13-08-2023 05:19 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Ars Technica reports that Microsoft "disclosed 15 high-severity vulnerabilities in a widely used collection of tools used to program operational devices inside industrial facilities" (like plants for power generation, factory automation, energy automation, and process automation).
  On Friday Microsoft "warned that while exploiting the code-execution and denial-of-service vulnerabilities was difficult, it enabled threat actors to 'inflict great damage on targets.'"
  The vulnerabilities affect the C
  
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• Some People Are Having Sex in San Francisco's Robotaxis

  13-08-2023 02:39 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard:As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are wondering just how far they can push the vehicles' limits — especially with no front-seat driver or chaperone to discourage them from questionable behavior... The Standard has spoken to four separate Cruise car riders who said they've had sex or hooked up in the driverless vehicles in San Francisco over recent months and have provided r
  
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• ChatGPT's Odds of Getting Code Questions Correct are Worse Than a Coin Flip

  13-08-2023 00:48 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a [pre-print] study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.
  The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The U.S. academics a
  
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