ICT news

• California Suspends GM Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles As 'Not Safe' For Public

  24-10-2023 23:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: California's auto regulator said on Tuesday it has suspended General Motors' Cruise autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing permits, saying it had misrepresented information related to the safety of the autonomous technology. Cruise's AVs posed an "an unreasonable risk to public safety," and "are not safe for the public's operation" California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said in a statement. The suspension, which came after
  
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• Google Falsely Flags Samsung Apps as 'Harmful,' Tells Users To Remove Them

  24-10-2023 22:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Most Android users have probably never seen Google Play Protect in action. The malware-scanning service is built into every Android device and is supposed to flag malware that users have installed. Recently it flagged some popular apps that are very much not malware: Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages.
  As spotted by 9to5Google, Samsung users have been getting hit with Play Protect warnings since earlier this month. Users on the Google Support forum have post
  
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• Microsoft CEO Admits Giving Up on Windows Phone and Mobile Was a Mistake

  24-10-2023 22:01 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes. From a report: Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft's acquisition of the Nokia phone business. In an interview with Business Insider, Nadella admitted that Microsoft's "exit" from the mobile phone business could have been handled better. Asked about a strategic m
  
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• Apple To Revamp TV App in Step Toward Simplifying Video Services

  24-10-2023 21:21 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Apple will redesign its TV app in a step toward consolidating the company's various video offerings later this year, part of its efforts to become a bigger player in the streaming world. Bloomberg News: The company is preparing a new version of the app for release around December as part of an upcoming tvOS software update, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is private. The app, which first launched in 2016, aggregates content from iTunes, the Apple TV+ subscription
  
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• Apple To Make Tools and Parts To Fix Phones and Computers Available Nationwide, White House Says

  24-10-2023 20:31 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Mac computer and iPhone maker Apple on Tuesday will announce plans to make parts, tools and documentation needed to repair its products available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide, at fair and reasonable prices, the White House said. From a report: National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard made the announcement in remarks prepared for a White House event later Tuesday focused on the so-called "right to repair," calling on Congress to pass legislation requiring such acti
  
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• Microsoft Now Wants You To Take a Poll Before Installing Google Chrome

  24-10-2023 20:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Downloading Chrome using Microsoft Edge is already a nightmare filled with banners and stop-gaps, and nothing seems to be stopping Microsoft from adding even more. From a report: Last weekend, we noticed that an attempt to download Google Chrome using Microsoft Edge results in the latter opening its sidebar with a poll, asking you to explain to Microsoft how you could dare try downloading Google Chrome. Of course, the exact wording is more tame, but you get the idea. Now, besides dismissing seve
  
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• How Economists Got It Wrong for 3 Years.

  24-10-2023 19:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Economists spent 2021 expecting inflation to prove "transitory." They spent much of 2022 underestimating its staying power. And they spent early 2023 predicting that the Federal Reserve's rate increases, meant to cure the inflation, would plunge the economy into a recession. None of those forecasts have panned out. The New York Times: Two big issues have made it difficult to forecast since 2020. The first was the coronavirus pandemic. The world had not experienced such a sweeping disease since t
  
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• They Cracked the Code To a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird.

  24-10-2023 18:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Unciphered, a Seattle-based startup, claims to have cracked the seemingly unbreakable encryption of IronKey S200, a decade-old USB thumb drive. By exploiting an undisclosed vulnerability in the device, the company says it can bypass the drive's feature that erases its contents after 10 incorrect password attempts. The breakthrough came within a day of receiving a test device, suggesting that the firm's hacking technique, powered by high-performance computing, could have far-reaching implications
  
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• Meta Sued by California, States Over Harmful Youth Marketing

  24-10-2023 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Meta Platforms was sued by California and a group of more than two dozen states over claims that its social-media platforms Instagram and Facebook exploit youths for profit and feed them harmful content. From a report: The suit, filed in federal court in California, adds to growing scrutiny of social media giants over how they serve their youngest users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• China Widens Lead Over US in AI Patents After Beijing Tech Drive

  24-10-2023 17:35 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  China is increasing its lead over the US in AI patent filings, underscoring the Asian nation's determination to shape and influence a technology that could have broad implications for the world's richest economies. From a report: Chinese institutions applied for 29,853 AI-related patents in 2022, climbing from 29,000 the year prior, according to data that the World Intellectual Property Organization provided to Bloomberg News. That's almost 80% more than US filings, which shrank 5.5%. Overall, C
  
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• Global Shift To Clean Energy Means Fossil Fuel Demand Will Peak Soon, IEA says

  24-10-2023 16:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Demand for climate-warming fuels like coal, oil and natural gas will likely peak before 2030, evidence of the accelerating global shift to energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s World Energy Outlook. From a report: "The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it's unstoppable. It's not a question of 'if', it's just a matter of 'how soon' -- and the sooner the better for all of us," said Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, i
  
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• UK Set To Reject Big Tech Call for Antitrust Appeals Route

  24-10-2023 16:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  UK ministers are poised to reject Big Tech calls for greater scope to appeal against decisions made by the country's antitrust regulator under new digital markets rules, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The government plans to use the new Digital Markets Unit within the regulator, the Competition and Market Authority, to apply extra scrutiny to companies such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms, and to curb their dominance. The division is expe
  
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• PetroChina Completes First International Crude Oil Trade In Digital Yuan

  24-10-2023 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Chinese oil and gas company PetroChina (0857) has completed the first international crude oil trade using the country's central bank digital currency (CBDC), the e-CNY, China Daily reported on Saturday. PetroChina bought 1 million barrels of crude oil settled in e-CNY, or digital yuan, at the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange (SHPGX) on Oct. 18, according to the report by the Chinese Communist Party-owned newspaper. The SHPGX did not d
  
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• Amazon's Live-Action Fallout Series Will Start Streaming In 2024

  24-10-2023 12:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon has revealed that Fallout -- a live-action adaptation of Bethesda's popular RPG video game franchise -- will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video. The Verge reports: The announcement was made on October 23rd, otherwise known to Fallout fans as "Fallout Day" -- the in-game date that marks the beginning of the Great War that turns the world into an irradiated nuclear wasteland. Bethesda's executive producer and game director Todd Howard is an executive producer on the s
  
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• Scientists Create World's Most Water-Resistant Surface

  24-10-2023 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Sammy Gecsoyler reports via The Guardian: A research team in Finland, led by Robin Ras, from Aalto University, and aided by researchers from the University of Jyvaskyla, has developed a mechanism to make water droplets slip off surfaces with unprecedented efficacy. Cooking, transportation, optics and hundreds of other technologies are affected by how water sticks to surfaces or slides off them, and adoption of water-resistant surfaces in the future could improve many household and industrial tec
  
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• New Data Poisoning Tool Lets Artists Fight Back Against Generative AI

  24-10-2023 05:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists' work to train their models without the creator's permission. Using it to "poison" this training data coul
  
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• Millions of Smart Meters Will Be Defunct When 2G and 3G Turns Off

  24-10-2023 04:02 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  Paul Kunert reports via The Register: A gaggle of MPs are calling for government to put together a timetable for the replacement of millions upon millions of smart meters that will be defunct when 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) comprised of cross-party MPs penned a report to update the rollout of the smart meters, with multiple deadlines missed along the way of the $17 billion billion project. The report echoes an earlier one by the National Audit
  
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• 1Password Discloses Security Incident Linked To Okta Breach

  24-10-2023 03:25 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Lawrence Abrams reports via BleepingComputer: 1Password, a popular password management platform used by over 100,000 businesses, suffered a security breach after hackers gained access to its Okta ID management tenant. "We detected suspicious activity on our Okta instance related to their Support System incident. After a thorough investigation, we concluded that no 1Password user data was accessed," reads a very brief security incident notification from 1Password CTO Pedro Canahuati. "On Septembe
  
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• Bitcoin Blasts Past $33,000 As Optimism For BTC Spot ETF Surges

  24-10-2023 02:45 via slashdot.org
  
  Bitcoin has surged past $33,000 per coin on Monday, rising nearly 11% in 24 hours. According to CoinGecko, the coin is up more than 17% in the past seven days. Decrypt reports: Bulls have flooded the space as talk about a spot Bitcoin ETF has investors hopeful that the long-awaited crypto product will soon get approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A Monday CoinShares report showed that institutional investors are pouring money into the space; JPMorgan analysts said last week
  
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• US Wants To Officially Treat Crypto Anonymity Services As Suspected Money Launderers

  24-10-2023 02:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Hamas' attacks against Israel on October 7 have shifted the geopolitical landscape and triggered a looming Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip. Now the ripple effects are reaching the cryptocurrency industry, where they've become the United States Department of the Treasury's rallying cry for a crackdown on cryptocurrency anonymity services. The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) [on October 19th] released a set of pro
  
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• 'Pause Ads' Creep Onto Hulu, Peacock and Max As Streamers Seek New Revenue

  24-10-2023 01:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Brian Steinberg reports via Variety: So-called "pause ads" -- they only turn up a few seconds after a viewer has decided to halt the programming, and not every time one does -- are seeing new movement in the streaming world, with the format appearing more frequently on Hulu since July, according to Josh Mattison, senior vice president of revenue management and operations for Disney Advertising. Pause ads are also in motion in venues such as NBCUniversal's Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max
  
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• Nvidia To Make Arm-Based PC Chips

  24-10-2023 00:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  According to Reuters, Nvidia is designing ARM-based processors that would run Microsoft's Windows operating system. While they're not expected to be ready until 2025, it poses a major new challenge to Intel which has long dominated the PC industry. From the report: The AI chip giant's new pursuit is part of Microsoft's effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since r
  
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• Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband

  24-10-2023 00:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the "worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else. Data also shows that despite billions in tax bre
  
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