ICT news

• Lego Drops Plans To Make Bricks From Recycled Plastic Bottles

  25-09-2023 23:20 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Denmark's Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world's largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has "decided not to progress" with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing "found the material d
  
  Read more

• Amazon Restricts Authors From Self-Publishing More Than Three Books a Day After AI Concerns

  25-09-2023 22:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months. The Guardian: The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,
  
  Read more

• The First Foldable PC Era is Unfolding

  25-09-2023 22:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. From a report: Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month. LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. A Google translation of LG's Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37-inches) thick when unfolded and used like a 17-inch tablet. Altern
  
  Read more

• Spotify Tests Voice Translation Feature for Podcasts

  25-09-2023 21:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Spotify is testing an AI-powered feature that will translate podcasts from the likes of Dax Shepard and Lex Fridman to other languages, the audio-streaming company said on Monday. From a report: The feature marks the latest attempt by the Swedish company to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that has taken the world by storm after the rise of ChatGPT, to tap new users and boost revenue.
  The translated versions, powered by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's newly released voi
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• JPEX Appears To Be a $178 Million Fraud

  25-09-2023 20:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Web3 is Going Great reports: After the Hong Kong-based JPEX exchange limited withdrawals amidst what appeared to be an impending collapse of the platform, things are now looking a lot more like fraud. Police have received more than 2,200 complaints pertaining to the exchange, involving $178 million in possible losses. Eleven people, including various crypto influencers who had promoted the exchange, were taken in for questioning. However, police have said those eleven people were not likely cent
  
  Read more

• ChatGPT Can Now Respond With Spoken Words

  25-09-2023 20:01 via slashdot.org
  
  ChatGPT has learned to talk. OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a version of its popular chatbot on Monday that can interact with people using spoken words. As with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and other digital assistants, users can talk to ChatGPT and it will talk back. From a report: For the first time, ChatGPT can also respond to images. People can, for example, upload a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, and the chatbot can give them a list of dish
  
  Read more

• Reddit Will Start Paying You Real Money For Your Karma

  25-09-2023 19:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. From a report: Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is dispersed once per month. So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe. Accounts must have existed for over 30
  
  Read more

• Huawei Mostly Omits Mentioning Mate 60 Phone in Two-Hour Event

  25-09-2023 18:40 via mobile.slashdot.org
  Huawei largely omitted mention of its Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products on Monday. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company will increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu, without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei's progress toward developing in-house ch
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• iPhone 15 Models Support USB-C to Ethernet for Faster Internet Speeds

  25-09-2023 18:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Following the launch of the iPhone 15 series today, a few readers of our website have reached out to highlight that the devices support USB-C to Ethernet adapters, allowing for a wired internet connection with faster download speeds than Wi-Fi. Apple confirmed this information in a support document last week, with USB to Ethernet adapters listed as compatible with iPhone 15 models. When an iPhone is connected to an Ethernet cable, an otherwise hidden Ethernet
  
  Read more

• A Ransomware Group Claims To Have Breached 'All Sony Systems'

  25-09-2023 16:52 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Tom Ivan, reporting for VGC: Ransomware group Ransomed[dot]vc claims to have successfully breached Sony Group and is threatening to sell a cache of data stolen from the Japanese company. While its claims remain unverified, Cyber Security Connect reports that the relative ransomware newcomer "has racked up an impressive amount of victims" since bursting onto the scene last month. "We have successfully compromissed [sic] all of sony systems," the group claimed on both the clear and dark nets. "We
  
  Read more

• Getty Images Promises Its New AI Contains No Copyrighted Art

  25-09-2023 16:41 via slashdot.org
  
  Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers. From a report: The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty's image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent. "Fundamentally, it's trained; it's clean. It's viable for businesses to use. We'll stand behind that
  
  Read more

• Amazon To Invest As Much As $4 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

  25-09-2023 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier. From a report: The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google's Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI also operates an AI-powered, text analyzing chatbot. As p
  
  Read more

• Linux's Multi-Grain Timestamps Short-Lived: Removed From The Kernel After A Few Weeks

  25-09-2023 13:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel.
  Multi-grain timestamps were intended for addressing cases where the current coarse-grained timesta
  
  Read more

• Los Alamos's New Project: Updating America's Aging Nuclear Weapon

  25-09-2023 09:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  During World War II, "Los Alamos was the perfect spot for the U.S. government's top-secret Manhattan Project," remembers the Associated Press.
  "The community is facing growing pains again, 80 years later, as Los Alamos National Laboratory takes part in the nation's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since World War II."
  The mission calls for modernizing the arsenal with droves of new workers producing plutonium cores — key components for nuclear weapons. Some 3,300 workers have been hir
  
  Read more

• Hollywood Studios and Writers Guild Reach Tentative Deal to End Writer's Strike

  25-09-2023 06:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  "After several long consecutive days of negotiations, the Writers Guild of America and the labor group representing studios and streamers have reached a tentative deal on a new contract," according to the Hollywood Reporter.
  "We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional," the Guild's negotiating committee told its members in an email, "with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership." The Hollywood Reporter calls the news "a major development th
  
  Read more

• Unity President Apologizes, Thanks Devs for 'Feedback', Pledges 'Sustainable' Future

  25-09-2023 04:48 via games.slashdot.org
  
  In an online Q&A Friday, Unity president Marc Whitten said they're pursuing a "sustainable" long-term future for Unity by creating a "shared success" business model that still allows for "massively, deeply investing in the engine". But Whitten began with acknowledging they had work to do to earn trust. "I just want to say that I'm sorry. I know it's been a very tough week to hear a bunch of the very well-deserved feedback on the changes we made. It's very clear we did not take enough feedbac
  
  Read more

• Developer Creates 'Dark Style' GNOME Extension for Ubuntu 23.10

  25-09-2023 02:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu.
  "But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..."You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that;
  
  Read more

• Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope

  25-09-2023 00:56 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times' media reporter:In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending.
  The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!