ICT news

• Amazon Workers' Sci-Fi Writing Is Imagining a World After Amazon

  21-10-2023 23:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The Worker as Futurist project assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction," explains its web site. "In a world where massive corporations not only exploit people but monopolize the power of future-making, how can workers and other people fight and write back?"
  I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook forma
  
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• How Ubuntu Linux Snuck Into High-End Dell Laptops

  21-10-2023 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open:First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to releas
  
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• Unless Open Source Evolves, HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

  21-10-2023 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Striek remembers Silicon Valley's long history of open source develoipment — and how HashiCorp "made the controversial decision to change licenses from the Mozilla Public License to MariaDB's Business Source Licesne. The key difference between these two licenses is that the BSL limits its grant to "non-production use".
  HashiCorp's CEO is now predicting there would be âoeno more open source companies in Silicon Valleyâ unless the community rethinks how it protect
  
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• California Supervolcano: Caltech's 'Chilling' Discovery In Long Valley Caldera

  21-10-2023 20:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from SciTechDaily:Since the 1980s, researchers have observed significant periods of unrest in a region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains characterized by swarms of earthquakes as well as the ground inflating and rising by almost half an inch per year during these periods. The activity is concerning because the area, called the Long Valley Caldera, sits atop a massive dormant supervolcano... What is behind the increased activity in the last few
  
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• Scammers Try Hosting Their Malware on a Binance Network

  21-10-2023 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Breached web sites distribute malware to visitors by claiming they need to update their browser. But one group of attackers "have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from being taken down by security experts or law enforcement," reports security researcher Brian Krebs.
  "By hosting the malicious files on a decentralized, anonymous cryptocurrency blockchain."[W]hen Cloudflare blocked those accounts the attackers began storing their malicious files as cryptocurrency transactions in
  
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• What Happens When Major Online Platforms Lower Traffic to News Sites?

  21-10-2023 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times:Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publ
  
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• JWST's Disconnect With Cosmology Models Linked to 'Bursty Star Formations'

  21-10-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Images from the James Webb Space Telescope "don't match scientists' models of how the universe formed," reports the Washington Post.
  "But it might not be time to dump the standard model of cosmology yet. "A recent analysis in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests an explanation for the surprisingly massive-seeming galaxies: brilliant, extremely bright bursts of newborn stars.
  The galaxies photographed by the telescope looked far too mature and large to have formed so fully so soon after the
  
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• 21 Species Moved From 'Endangered' to 'Extinct' in America

  21-10-2023 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Nearly two dozen species are being taken off America's endangered species list, reports CBS News, "because they are extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday."Most of the species were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s or 1980s and were very low in numbers or likely already extinct at the time of listing. In the years since, "rigorous reviews of the best available science" have been conducted to determine whether the animals are extinct. "Federal protection came t
  
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• China Restricts Exports of Graphite As It Escalates a Global Tech War

  21-10-2023 15:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: China has unveiled plans to restrict exports of graphite -- a mineral crucial to the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) -- on national security grounds, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs said Friday. The announcement comes just days after the United States imposed additional limits on the kinds of semiconductors that American companies can sell to Chinese firms. China, which dominates the world's pro
  
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• Next Year, SpaceX Aims To Average One Launch Every 2.5 Days

  21-10-2023 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Stephen Clark reports via Ars Technica: Earlier this week, SpaceX launched for the 75th time this year, continuing a flight cadence that should see the company come close to 100 missions by the end of December. SpaceX plans to kick its launch rate into a higher gear in 2024. This will be largely driven by launches of upgraded Starlink satellites with the ability to connect directly with consumer cell phones, a service SpaceX calls "Starlink Direct to Cell," a company official told Ars this week.
  
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• British Museum Will Digitize Entire Collection At a Cost of $12.1 Million In Response To Thefts

  21-10-2023 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Karen K. Ho reports via ARTnews: British Museum has announced plans to digitize its entire collection in order to increase security and public access, as well as ward off calls for the repatriation of items. The project will require 2.4 million records to upload or upgrade and is estimated to take five years to complete. The museum's announcement on October 18 came after the news 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, identified in news reports as former curat
  
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• Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions On Biden Administration Efforts To Get Platforms To Remove Social Media Posts

  21-10-2023 05:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Friday blocked in full a lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media companies about contentious content on such issues as Covid-19. The decision in a short unsigned order (PDF) puts on hold a Louisiana-based judge's ruling in July that specific agencies and officials should be barred from meeting with companies to discuss whether certain content should be sti
  
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• Jon Stewart's Apple TV Plus Show Ends, Reportedly Over Coverage of AI and China

  21-10-2023 04:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Shakrai writes: Multiple outlets are reporting that Apple TV Plus has cancelled Jon Stewart's popular show The Problem with Jon Stewart, reportedly over editorial disagreements with regards to planned stories on the People's Republic of China and AI. Fans and haters of Apple will both recall that Apple recently made changes to AirDrop, one of the few effective means Chinese dissidents and protesters had for exchanging information off-grid at scale, and will ask why Apple is apparently not only w
  
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• Amazon Eliminated Plastic Packaging At One of Its Warehouses

  21-10-2023 03:25 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Umar Shakir reports via The Verge: Amazon is fulfilling a small part of its promise to switch from using plastic bubble mailers and air pillows to all recyclable paper packaging for its shipments. The company announced that it has outfitted one facility in Euclid, Ohio, with an upgraded packaging machine that can automatically fold custom-fit boxes to wrap some products, use paper mailers for small items, and slide in paper fillers instead of plastic ones in standard boxes.As Amazon transitions
  
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• Thousands of Remote IT Workers Sent Wages To North Korea To Help Fund Weapons Program, Says FBI

  21-10-2023 02:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  echo123 shares a report from the Associated Press: Thousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said. The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get
  
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• US Chip Curbs Give Huawei a Chance To Fill the Nvidia Void In China

  21-10-2023 02:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia's best-selling chips, including the A100 a
  
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• OpenBSD 7.4 Released

  21-10-2023 01:20 via bsd.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes: OpenBSD 7.4 has been officially released. The 55th release of this BSD operating system, known for being security oriented, brings a lot of new things, including dynamic tracer, pfsync improvements, loads of security goodies and virtualization improvements. Grab your copy today! As mentioned by Phoronix's Michael Larabel, some of the key highlights include:- Dynamic Tracer (DT) and Utrace support on AMD64 and i386 OpenBSD
  - Power savings for those runni
  
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• Windows 11 Pro's On-By-Default Encryption Slows SSDs Up To 45%

  21-10-2023 00:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a Tom's Hardware report: Unfortunately, a default setting in Windows 11 Pro, having its software BitLocker encryption enabled, robs as much as 45 percent of the speed from your SSD as it forces your processor to encrypt and decrypt everything. According to our tests, random writes and reads -- which affect the overall performance of your PC -- get hurt the most, but even large sequential transfers are affected.
  While many SSDs come with hardware-based encryption, which
  
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• BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce, Toyota, and Lexus Are Switching To Tesla's EV Charging Standard

  21-10-2023 00:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Toyota and BMW are two of the latest automakers to announce they're adopting Tesla's North American Charging System (NACS) plug for their North American EVs, giving drivers access to Tesla's Supercharger network. Ars Technica reports: BMW's announcement applies to all its car brands, which means that in addition to EVs like the BMW i5 or i7, it's also swapping over to NACS for the upcoming Mini EVs as well as the Rolls-Royce Spectre. BMW will start adding native NACS ports to its EVs in 2025, an
  
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