ICT news

• Millions of Americans' Health Data Stolen After MOVEit Hackers Targeted IBM

  14-08-2023 23:21 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Millions of Americans had their sensitive medical and health information stolen after hackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the widely used MOVEit file transfer software raided systems operated by tech giant IBM. Colorado's Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF), which is responsible for administering Colorado's Medicaid program, confirmed on Friday that it had fallen victim to the MOVEit mass-hacks, exposing the data o
  
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• Bomb Threat Causes Mass Evacuation at DEF CON Hacking Convention

  14-08-2023 22:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A bomb threat against Caesars Forum, the main venue for this week's DEF CON hacking convention, led to the halls being cleared on Saturday evening and the building searched by fire crews and police officers. The Register reports: The timing was very bad, coming in the evening of the main party night for the event. The conference Goons, the red-shirted volunteers who serve as guides and organizers, were praised by attendees for managing the evacuation with aplomb, but when it became clear that th
  
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• Netflix Starts Testing Game Streaming on Select Devices, Smart TVs and Desktop Browsers

  14-08-2023 22:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Netflix is officially bringing its games to more devices. So far, the company's impressive library of games has only been available on iOS and Android. Now, though, Netflix is starting to use its streaming tech to publicly test its titles on TVs and computers. From a report: "Our goal has always been to have a game for everyone, and we are working hard to meet members where they are with an accessible, smooth and ubiquitous service," Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice-president of games, wrote in a blog
  
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• A Brief History of the Corporate Presentation

  14-08-2023 21:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  PowerPoint dominates presentations, utilized everywhere from sermons to weddings. In 2010, Microsoft revealed it was on over a billion computers. Before PowerPoint, 35-millimeter film slides reigned for impactful CEO presentations. These "multi-image" shows needed producers, photographers, and a production team to execute. MIT Technology Review has a rundown of the corporate presentation history.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• 'The Big Short' Fame Michael Burry Has Bet Against the Market, SEC Filings Show

  14-08-2023 20:17 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Michael Burry, the money manager made famous in the book and film "The Big Short," held bearish options against the broad S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 Index at the end of the second quarter, according to securities fillings released on Monday. From a report: Burry's Scion Asset Management bought put options with a notional value of $739 million against the popular Invesco QQQ Trust ETF during the quarter, and separate put options with a notional value of $886 million against the SPDR S&P 500 E
  
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• Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Decision

  14-08-2023 20:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment" by promoting the use of fossil fuels. From a report: The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state's environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstituti
  
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• Zoom Ends No-Meeting Wednesday Policy, Calling It 'Barrier To Collaboration'

  14-08-2023 19:29 via slashdot.org
  
  Zoom has nixed its policy forbidding internal meetings on Wednesdays, saying it hindered collaboration, a move that goes against the grain -- and its own employees' preferences -- as more companies look to reduce unnecessary gatherings. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan disclosed the shift last week in a memo to employees, which also included a new policy on office attendance, requiring those living within 50 miles of a corporate location to come in twice a week. It reverses a pol
  
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• Dell Australia Fined By Regulators Over 'Misleading' Device Discount Tactics

  14-08-2023 18:44 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Dell has been fined more than $6.5 million by Australian regulators after it was found to have misled consumers on discounted hardware prices. From a report: The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) imposed a $10 million AUS fine on the tech giant for "making false and misleading representations" about discounted prices for add-on computer monitors. Dell Australia admitted that it has misled customers over prices available on monitors in 'bundle' packages alongside desktop, lapt
  
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• Rockstar Games Acquires Modding Team That It Previously Banned

  14-08-2023 18:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  In 2015, popular Grand Theft Auto V mod FiveM was banned by Rockstar after the gaming giant alleged that FiveM's work "contains code designed to facilitate piracy." Eight years later, Rockstar is taking a decidedly different tone in announcing that Cfx.re -- the mod team behind FiveM and a similar mod for Red Dead Redemption 2 -- is now "officially a part of Rockstar Games." ArsTechnica: With no apparent sense of irony, Rockstar said in a Friday blog post announcing the acquisition that it has "
  
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• Amazon Loses Key Backer Four Years Into Plan To Eliminate Carbon Emissions

  14-08-2023 17:23 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Four years into a plan to eliminate its carbon emissions, Amazon has lost a key endorsement from the world's leading watchdog of corporate climate goals. From a report: The Science Based Targets initiative, a United Nations-backed entity that validates net zero plans, has removed Amazon from its list of companies taking action on climate goals after the tech behemoth failed to implement its commitment to set a credible target for reducing carbon emissions. The move raises questions around Amazon
  
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• Amazon Is Rolling Out a Generative AI Feature That Summarizes Product Reviews

  14-08-2023 16:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon is rolling out a new generative AI feature that summarizes product reviews for customers. From a report: The feature, which the company began testing earlier this year, is designed to help shoppers determine at a glance what other customers said about a product before they spend time reading through individual reviews. It will pick out common themes and summarize them in a short paragraph on the product detail page. The company wrote in a blog post published Monday that the AI-generated r
  
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• An Apple Malware-Flagging Tool Is 'Trivially' Easy To Bypass

  14-08-2023 16:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  One of the Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. From a report: At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings today about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool. There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy beca
  
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• 'The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think'

  14-08-2023 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times:
  More than $1.7 trillion worldwide is expected to be invested in technologies such as wind, solar power, electric vehicles and batteries globally this year, according to the International Energy Agency, compared with just over $1 trillion in fossil fuels. That is by far the most ever spent on clean energy in a year. Those investments are driving explosive growth. China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity
  
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• Why US Tech Giants Are Threatening to Leave the UK

  14-08-2023 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "It was difficult to maintain a poker face when the leader of a big US tech firm I was chatting to said there was a definite tipping point at which the firm would exit the UK," writes a BBC technology editor:Many of these companies are increasingly fed up. Their "tipping point" is UK regulation — and it's coming at them thick and fast. The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high
  
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• In Generative AI Market, Amazon Chases Microsoft and Google with Custom AWS Chips

  14-08-2023 07:36 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:In an unmarked office building in Austin, Texas, two small rooms contain a handful of Amazon employees designing two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. These custom chips, Inferentia and Trainium, offer AWS customers an alternative to training their large language models on Nvidia GPUs, which have been getting difficult and expensive to procure. "The entire world would like more chips for doing generative AI, whether
  
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• Could Supermassive Black Holes Explain Our Universe's Gravitational-Wave 'Hum'?

  14-08-2023 05:22 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.
  "Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin."
  Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which co
  
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• Stack Overflow 'Evolves', Previewing AI-Powered Answers and Chat Followups

  14-08-2023 02:26 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  "Stack Overflow is adding artificial intelligence to its offerings," reports ZDNet (which notes traffic to the Q&A site has dropped 5% in the last year).
  So in a video, Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says that search and question-asking "will evolve to provide you with instant summarized solutions with citations to sources, aggregated by generative AI — plus the option to ask follow-up questions in a chat-like format."
  The New Stack provides some context:As computer scient
  
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• How Laser Sensors Could Improve America's Electric Grid

  14-08-2023 01:29 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  By 2035 America needs a 43% increase in its power-transmitting capacity, according to an analysis by the REPEAT project.But NPR reports there's another way to quickly improve capacity without building new transmission lines:That's where the laser sensors come in, says Jon Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, the company that makes them. Sensors can help utilities get real-time data on their power lines, which can allow them to send more renewable electricity through the wires. This tech is part o
  
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• Does Desktop Linux Have a Firefox Problem?

  14-08-2023 00:09 via news.slashdot.org
  
  OS News' managing editor calls Firefox "the single most important desktop Linux application," shipping in most distros (with some users later opting for a post-installation download of Chrome).
  But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..."While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux di
  
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