ICT news

• Whatever Happened to Amazon's Drone Delivery Service?

  04-11-2023 22:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The New York Times shows an enormous Amazon drone hovering over a driveway in the Texas suburbs. (Alternate URL here.) The drone lets go of a large brown package, which plummets to the ground.
  But 10 years after Amazon revealed its drone program, drone delivery is only "kind of" a reality, the Times argues — in one city in Texas. "The venture as it currently exists is so underwhelming that Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away."Years of toil by top scientists and
  
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• Researchers Found an Abundance of Helium In Canada's Baffin Island

  04-11-2023 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader thepacketmaster writes: Documented in a recent article in the journal Nature, researchers have found an abundance of both helium-4 and helium-3 trapped in the volcanic rocks on Canada's Baffin Island.As the Earth formed, it is thought that helium-4 and helium-3 flowing on the solar wind became trapped in the minerals of the cooling planet. With heavier elements and minerals sinking to the bottom, this trapped helium was transported to the core, where it would have remai
  
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• Will AI-Powered SEO Ruin Google's Search Results?

  04-11-2023 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  A long read at the Verge explores the quality of Google's search results — and whether they've been affected by the Search Engine Optimization industry.But it begins by saying that "A lot of folks' complain that "The links that pop up when they go looking for answers online, they say, are "absolutely unusable"; "garbage"; and "a nightmare" because "a lot of the content doesn't feel authentic."
  If so, the question is why. SEO Daron Babin warns that "We're entering a very weird time, technol
  
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• FSF Warns About the Perils of Medical Devices with Un-Free Software

  04-11-2023 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom," warns the program manager of the Free Software Foundation:
  In July, users of the proprietary software app LibreLink, who live in the UK and use Apple devices, found that the app they depend on to monitor their blood sugar was not working anymore after the developer Abbott pushed an update for the app... Despite what its name may suggest, there is nothing libre about the LibreLink app. It's proprietary software, which means us
  
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• CNN Criticizes Microsoft's 'Making a Mess of the News' By Replacing MSN's Staff With AI

  04-11-2023 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  CNN decries "false and bizarre" news stories being published by Microsoft on MSN.com, "one of the world's most trafficked websites and a place where millions of Americans get their news every day."Microsoft's decision to increasingly rely on the use of automation and artificial intelligence over human editors to curate its homepage appears to be behind the site's recent amplification of false and bizarre stories, people familiar with how the site works told CNN.The site, which comes pre-loaded a
  
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• US Approves Massive Windfarm Project Off the Coast of Virginia

  04-11-2023 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Tuesday Orsted cancelled two wind farms near New Jersey that would've generated about 2.2 gigawatts of energy. But the same day America's Interior Department approved plans to install up to 176 wind turbines off the coast of Virginia with an estimated capacity of about 2.6 gigawatts of clean energy.
  Located approximately 27 miles from the shores of Virginia Beach, the project will be America's largest offshore wind project, capable of powering over 900,000 homes. In just its first 10 years it sh
  
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• Mozilla Introduces Firefox Nightly .deb Packages for Debian-based Linux Distros

  04-11-2023 16:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Mozilla has some news for users of Debian-based Linux distributions (such as Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and others):installing, updating, and testing the latest Firefox Nightly builds just got a lot easier. We've set up a new APT repository for you to install Firefox Nightly as a .deb package... These packages are compatible with the same Debian and Ubuntu versions as our traditional binaries. If you've previously used our traditional binaries (distributed as .tar.bz2 archives), switching to Mo
  
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• Will 'News Influencers' Replace Traditional Media?

  04-11-2023 15:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post looks at the "millions of independent creators reshaping how people get their news, especially the youngest viewers."News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in 5 adult
  
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• NASA Spacecraft Discovers Tiny Moon Around Asteroid

  04-11-2023 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  During a close flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh, NASA's Lucy spacecraft discovered a mini moon a mere one-tenth-of-a-mile (220 meters) in size. For comparison, Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. The Associated Press reports: NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original t
  
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• NASA Open To Extending ISS Beyond 2030

  04-11-2023 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: A NASA official opened the door to keeping the International Space Station in operation beyond 2030 if commercial space stations are not yet ready to take over by the end of the decade. Speaking at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Nov. 2, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said it was "not mandatory" to retire the ISS as currently planned at the end of the decade depending on the progress companies are making on commercial stations.
  
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• Leap Seconds Could Become Leap Minutes

  04-11-2023 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timeke
  
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• VW Group's Troubled Cariad Software Division To Lay Off 2,000 Workers

  04-11-2023 02:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  According to Germany's Manager Magazin, Volkswagen's board has approved laying off 2,000 employees in the Cariad software unit as part of the latest restructuring intended to right the digital ship. Autoblog reports: Former group CEO Herbert Diess established Car.Software Organization in 2020, eventually renaming it Cariad and giving the task of creating "a uniform software and technology platform for all Volkswagen Group brands." VW's info page on the division says the unit employs roughly 6,00
  
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• Microsoft Commits To 6 Years of Firmware Updates For New and Some Older Surface PCs

  04-11-2023 01:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has updated its Surface support documentation, committing to supporting some Surface Pcs with six years of firmware updates -- up from the four years it originally offered. Windows Central reports: The updated documentation states that any Surface PC shipped after January 1, 2021 will receive six years of firmware updates. Surface devices shipped before that date will remain on four years of firmware updates. This means Surface Pro 7+, Surface Go 3, Surface Laptop 4, Surface Laptop Go
  
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• YouTube Crackdown Leads To 'Hundreds of Thousands' of Ad Blocker Uninstalls

  04-11-2023 00:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers is in full swing, leading to a wave of ad blocker uninstalls. 9to5Google reports: As Wired reports, this rollout has led to "hundreds of thousands" of uninstalls, not of YouTube but of ad blockers. The figures apparently come from various ad-blocking companies, where October saw a "record number" of people uninstalling ad blockers. Meanwhile, it also led to a record number of new installs, as many users looked to switch from one blocker to another in an effort
  
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