ICT news

• Microsoft and Paige Are Building the World's Largest AI Model for Detecting Cancer

  08-09-2023 23:21 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is teaming up with digital pathology provider Paige to build the world's largest image-based artificial intelligence model for identifying cancer. From a report: The AI model is training on an unprecedented amount of data that includes billions of images, according to a release. It can identify both common cancers and rare cancers that are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and researchers hope it will eventually help doctors who are struggling to contend with staffing shortages and gr
  
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• Australia Moves Towards Digital Statutory Declarations

  08-09-2023 22:41 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The days of signing on the dotted line may be numbered -- at least in Australia. From a report: The federal government has announced it is taking statutory declarations into the digital age, saying it will accept electronic signatures and video link witnessing from next year. It makes permanent a change introduced during the pandemic, when attending a justice of the peace (JP) for a statutory declaration -- a practice that goes back to the 19th century -- was forbidden under lockdown restriction
  
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• 'Apple Becomes the Biggest US-China Pawn Yet'

  08-09-2023 22:02 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple might be the king of tech. But in the growing cold economic war between the world's two biggest economies, it is becoming just another game piece -- albeit a big one. WSJ: Still the world's largest public company by market value, Apple has seen that value take a notable hit this week on increasing signs that its business in China might be coming under threat. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Chinese government is banning the iPhone and other foreign-branded devices fr
  
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• UN Warns World Will Miss Climate Targets Unless Fossil Fuels Phased Out

  08-09-2023 21:22 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Governments are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and to stave off climate disaster, a major report by the UN has found. From a report: Meeting the goals will require "phasing out all unabated fossil fuels," the report says, in an acknowledgment that some oil-producing countries may find hard to take. The need to phase out fossil fuels has not been explicitly adopted by the UN before, under successive rounds of climate talks, and languag
  
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• NYPD Spent Millions To Contract With Firm Banned by Meta for Fake Profiles

  08-09-2023 20:44 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data. From a report: Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with
  
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• New Flaw in Apple Devices Led To Spyware Infection, Researchers Say

  08-09-2023 20:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers at digital watchdog group Citizen Lab say they found spyware they linked to Israeli firm NSO that exploited a newly discovered flaw in Apple devices. From a report: While inspecting the Apple device of an employee of a Washington-based civil society group last week, Citizen Lab said it found the flaw had been used to infect the device with NSO's Pegasus spyware, it said in a statement.
  Bill Marczak, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said the attacker likely made a mistake during the
  
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• OpenAI Admits that AI Writing Detectors Don't Work

  08-09-2023 19:20 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI recently shared guidelines for educators on using ChatGPT as an educational tool in a blog post, also noting in a related FAQ the ineffectiveness of AI writing detectors often resulting in false positives against students. ArsTechnica: In a section of the FAQ titled "Do AI detectors work?", OpenAI writes, "In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and h
  
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• IRS Deploys AI To Target Rich Partnerships

  08-09-2023 18:40 via slashdot.org
  
  The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms. From a report: The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year's Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become
  
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• Polish Senate Says Use of Government Spyware is Illegal in the Country

  08-09-2023 18:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A special commission within Poland's Senate concluded that the government's use of spyware, like the one made by NSO Group, is illegal. From a report: The commission announced on Thursday the conclusion of its 18-month-long investigation into allegations that the Polish government used NSO's spyware, known as Pegasus, to spy on an opposition politician and other politicians around the time of the country's 2019 elections. "Pegasus cannot be used under Polish law," the report read, according to a
  
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• Bogus Supplier of Jet-Engine Parts May Have Faked Employees Too

  08-09-2023 17:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Siddharth Vikram Philip, Sabah Meddings, and Supriya Singh, reporting for Bloomberg News: As chief commercial officer of aircraft-parts supplier AOG Technics, Ray Kwong can look back on a well-rounded career at A-list companies including All Nippon Airways, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nissan Motor. That, at least, is Kwong's two-decade corporate journey on what appears to be his LinkedIn profile, from which the self-proclaimed executive beams with a broad smile and striped tie in blue hues.
  
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• NFT Startup Rario Founders To Leave a Year After $120M Funding

  08-09-2023 17:08 via slashdot.org
  
  Founders of Rario, the cricket NFT startup in which India's Dream11 led a $120 million funding round last year, are leaving the two-year-old firm, TechCrunch reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Ankit Wadhwa, who serves as Rario CEO, and Sunny Bhanot, Rario CTO, are being pushed out as investors at the startup, including largest backer Dream11, exert greater control, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. [...] Just last year, Rario r
  
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• 11,196 Years Jail Sentence for Faruk Ozer, CEO of Collapsed Turkish Crypto Exchange Thodex

  08-09-2023 16:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Faruk Fatih Ozer, the founder of the collapsed Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, his sister Serap Ozer and his brother Guven Ozer have been sentenced to 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days in prison, according to local media. A judicial fine of 135 million liras ($5 million approx.) was also imposed. From a report: Thodex was one of Turkey's largest crypto exchanges before it suddenly went offline in April 2021 and Ozer went missing. Over 400,000 members were left in the dark without access to dep
  
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• Not Mining Bitcoin Is Now More Profitable Than Mining It

  08-09-2023 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  nickovs writes: The Register reports that the Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms made more money in August from not mining Bitcoin than from doing so, as a result of credits that the company received for not running its mining rigs.Not only did it make more money from power credits and demand response credits than it did from mining coins, the company's monthly report shows that August credits totalled $31.6M, more than two and half times the total value of bitcoins mined in July, when energy prices,
  
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• The International Criminal Court Will Now Prosecute Cyberwar Crimes

  08-09-2023 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have called for a kind of Geneva Convention for cyberwar, new international laws that would create clear consequences for anyone hacking civilian critical infrastructure, like power grids, banks, and hospitals. Now the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague has made it clear that he intends to enforce those consequences -- no new Geneva Convention required. Instead, he
  
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• Texas Cryptomining Outfit Earns More From Idling Rigs Than Digging Bitcoin

  08-09-2023 12:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Bitcoin mining outfit Riot Platforms earned $31.7 million from Texas power authorities last month for curtailing operations -- far more than the value of the Bitcoin it mined in the same period. The Register reports: In a press release yesterday, Riot said it produced 333 Bitcoin at its mining operations in Rockdale, Texas, which would have been worth just shy of $9 million on August 31. All the cash earned from those energy credits, on the other hand, equates to around 1,136 Bitcoin, Riot CEO J
  
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• Humanized Kidneys Grown Inside Pigs For the First Time

  08-09-2023 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Scientists have grown humanized kidneys in pigs, raising the prospect of human organs being grown inside animals. The Guardian reports: The research involved creating human-pig chimeric embryos containing a combination of human and pig cells. When transferred into surrogate pig mothers, the developing embryos were shown to have kidneys that contained mostly human cells, marking the first time that scientists have grown a solid humanized organ inside another animal. The kidneys were not entirely
  
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• Outage At Square Prevents Small Businesses From Accepting Credit Cards

  08-09-2023 07:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The financial services platform Square is experiencing a widespread outage causing many small businesses around the country to switch to cash only. From a report: n a statementÂposted to their website, Square said it began investigating a service disruption linked to its data center at 11:47 a.m. As of 4:48 p.m., the San Francisco-based company said it was still working on a fix.ÂAaron Bergh, owner of Calwise Spirits Co. in Paso Robles, said he noticed the disruption around noon. In
  
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• The End of Airbnb In New York

  08-09-2023 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thousands of Airbnbs and short-term rentals are about to be wiped off the map in New York City. Local Law 18, which came into force Tuesday, is so strict it doesn't just limit how Airbnb operates in the city -- it almost bans it entirely for many guests and hosts. From now on, all short-term rental hosts in New York must register with the city, and only those who live in the place they're renting -- and are present when someone is staying -- can qu
  
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• Microsoft Signs Giant Carbon Removal Deal To Sponge Up CO2 Using Limestone

  08-09-2023 03:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  In a deal that could be worth $200 million, Microsoft announced that it is purchasing 315,000 metric tons of carbon removal over a multi-year period from climate tech startup Heirloom Carbon. It's one of the biggest deals of its kind, reports The Wall Street Journal (paywalled). GeekWire reports: San Francisco-based Heirloom is harnessing a geologic approach to catching and holding carbon dioxide. Limestone naturally binds to carbon, but Heirloom's technology dramatically speeds up the process,
  
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• Ex-FTX Executive Ryan Salame To Forfeit $1.5 Billion As Part of Guilty Plea

  08-09-2023 03:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Ryan Salame, a top FTX executive who played a key role in the exchange's political fundraising operations, will forfeit $1.5 billion after pleading guilty on Thursday to federal criminal charges tied to the exchange. CoinDesk reports: Salame, who was co-CEO of FTX's Bahamas entity FTX Digital Markets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make unlawful contributions and defraud the Federal Election Commission and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transferring business. "I made political contri
  
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• Microsoft Is Testing a Background Removal Tool In Paint

  08-09-2023 02:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Windows Insiders that lets you remove an image's background in Paint with a single click. The Verge reports: To use the tool, testers can open an image with Paint and then hit the background removal button on the left side of Paint's toolbar. From there, Paint will automatically detect the subject of an image and cut away the background. Microsoft notes that you can also manually select the portion of the background that you want to remove.Read more of t
  
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• Clubhouse Is Pivoting From Live Audio To Group Messaging

  08-09-2023 02:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Clubhouse, the invite-only social audio app that went viral during the pandemic, is trying to make a comeback by rebranding itself as a better alternative for group texting. Engadget reports: The audio app is pivoting from its signature "drop-in" audio conversations to friend-centric voice chats, the company said in an update. Instead of sprawling rooms where users host live-streamed conversations open to any and all of the app's users, the new Clubhouse will instead encourage users to join grou
  
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• Google's Cookie Killing Tech Is Now On Almost Every Chrome Browser

  08-09-2023 01:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Google's Privacy Sandbox, a controversial set of tools and settings meant to replace third-party cookies, is now on almost every single Chrome browser, according to a company blog post published Thursday. Google says Privacy Sandbox is now available to around 97% of Chrome users, and that number will reach 100% in the next few months. The news comes on the heels of the browser's 15th anniversary, which Google is celebrating by redesigning Chrome
  
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• Grindr Loses Nearly Half Its Staff To Strict Return-To-Work Rule

  08-09-2023 01:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Nearly half of LGBTQ dating app Grindr's workforce has quit after the company enacted a strict two-day-per-week in-office requirement -- and furious staffers claim the mandate was in retaliation for their campaign to unionize. From a report: Last month, Grindr informed employees that they had two weeks to decide whether they would relocate to a "hub" office location and work on site two days per week or terminate their employment, according to the labor group Communications Workers of America. T
  
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• Morgan Stanley To Launch AI Chatbot To Woo Wealthy

  08-09-2023 00:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Morgan Stanley is rolling out a generative AI chatbot this month to help bankers quickly find research or forms without needing to sift through hundreds of thousands of documents. According to Reuters, it's being developed with OpenAI. From the report: The bank is also developing technology which eventually, with clients' permission, could create a meeting summary of the conversation, draft a follow-up email suggesting next steps, update the bank's sales database, schedule a follow-up appointmen
  
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• Chinese Social Media Campaigns Are Successfully Impersonating US Voters, Microsoft Warns

  08-09-2023 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the repor
  
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