ICT news

• Google Search Ending 'Notes' Experiment

  16-07-2024 22:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is discontinuing its experimental Notes feature in Search Labs, the company confirmed on Wednesday. The feature, launched in November, allowed users to add comments and tips to search results and Discover content. It aimed to create a community-driven platform within Google's ecosystem, similar to social media forums.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Delta Air Lines CEO Questions Financial Strategy of Low-Cost Carriers

  16-07-2024 22:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian had stark words for competing airlines that depend on selling low-priced tickets to stay alive. From a report: "You cannot, if you are on the lower end of the industry's food chain, continue to post losses, particularly given the health of the demand set we've seen over these last couple of years," Bastian said as Delta reported disappointing second-quarter financials and warned things could get even worse.
  Airlines that can't break even "will not be given the oppo
  
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• Google Now Defaults To Not Indexing Your Content

  16-07-2024 21:24 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader a report:Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.
  From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a "default to not index" basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision ap
  
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• Hackers Claim To Have Leaked 1.1 TB of Disney Slack Messages

  16-07-2024 20:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A group calling itself "NullBulge" published a 1.1-TB trove of data late last week that it claims is a dump of Disney's internal Slack archive. From a report: The data allegedly includes every message and file from nearly 10,000 channels, including unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and APIs. The hackers claim they got access to the data from a Disney insider and named the alleged collaborator.
  Whether the hackers actually had inside help remains
  
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• Amazon Enforces New Office Hours Rule

  16-07-2024 20:16 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon is now monitoring the hours corporate employees spend in the office. From a report: This move is intended to crack down on people who are trying to skirt the company's return-to-office policy, Business Insider has learned. Several teams across Amazon, including the retail and cloud-computing units, were told in recent months that a minimum of two hours per visit is required to count as office attendance, according to multiple screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by BI and peopl
  
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• Bitcoin is Legit, BlackRock's Larry Fink Says

  16-07-2024 19:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Speaking of crypto, BlackRock's co-founder and CEO Larry Fink is now embracing crypto more than ever. From a report: In an interview with CNBC on Monday, he mentioned that he had abandoned his initial skepticism of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. He now firmly believes that there is a place for crypto in the average investor's portfolio. "I believe Bitcoin is legitimate. I'm not saying there aren't misuses like everything else, but it is a legitimate financial instrument that allows you to have u
  
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• Craig Wright Faces Perjury Investigation Over Claims He Created Bitcoin

  16-07-2024 18:49 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A judge in the UK High Court has directed prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against computer scientist Craig Wright, after ruling that he lied "extensively and repeatedly" and committed forgery "on a grand scale" in service of his quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin. From a report: In a judgment published Tuesday, Justice James Mellor outlined various injunctions to be imposed upon Wright, after finding in May that he had "engaged in the deliberate productio
  
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• Latest MySQL Release is Underwhelming, Say Some DB Experts

  16-07-2024 18:05 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  The latest release of MySQL has underwhelmed some commentators who fear Oracle -- the custodian of the open source database -- may have other priorities. From a report: Earlier this month, Oracle -- which has long marketed its range of proprietary database systems -- published the 9.0 version as an "Innovation Release" of MySQL. MySQL 9.0 is now among the three iterations Oracle supports. The others include 8.0 (8.0.38) and the first update of the 8.4 LTS (8.4.1).
  [...] In June, Peter Zaitsev, a
  
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• NASA Transmits Hip-Hop Song To Deep Space for First Time

  16-07-2024 17:26 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NASA: The stars above and on Earth aligned as an inspirational message and lyrics from the song "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" by hip-hop artist Missy Elliott were beamed to Venus via NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network). The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sent the transmission at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Friday, July 12. As the largest and most sensitive telecommunication service of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, the DSN has an array of giant radio antenna
  
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• Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos To Train AI

  16-07-2024 16:43 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data, but an investigation by Proof News found some of the wealthiest AI companies in the world have used material from thousands of YouTube videos to train AI. Companies did so despite YouTube's rules against harvesting materials from the platform without permission. From a report: Our investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweigh
  
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• Climate Crisis is Making Days Longer, Study Finds

  16-07-2024 16:07 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. From a report: The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity's actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navig
  
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• Microsoft Investigated by UK Over Ex-Inflection Staff Hires

  16-07-2024 15:08 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft's investment into Inflection AI will get a full-blown UK antitrust probe, after the watchdog said it needed to take a closer look at the hiring of former employees from the artificial intelligence startup. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday it was opening the formal phase one merger probe into the partnership, setting a Sept. 11 deadline on whether to escalate it to an in-depth investigation. The agency has been swift to act against big tech's AI startup
  
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• Senate Introduces Bill To Setup Legal Framework For Ethical AI Development

  16-07-2024 12:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Last week, the U.S. Senate introduced a new bill to outlaw the unethical use of AI-generated content and deepfake technology. Called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act), the bill would "set new federal transparency guidelines for marking, authenticating and detecting AI-generated content, protect journalists, actors and artists against AI-driven theft, and hold violators accountable for abuses." TechSpot reports: Proposed and sponsored by
  
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• Radar Images Suggest There's a Tunnel On the Moon

  16-07-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: A team of researchers think they've discovered a cave on the Moon in radar images of the lunar surface, which they posit could be a future site for an established human presence on our rocky satellite. The tunnel is in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) pit, the deepest known pit on the Moon. (If the name is familiar to you, the Sea of Tranquility is where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969.) The pit formed due to a
  
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• Record Labels Sue Verizon After ISP 'Buried Head In Sand' Over Subscribers' Piracy

  16-07-2024 05:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Just before the weekend, dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. In common with previous lawsuits that accused rivals of similar inaction, Verizon Communications Inc., Verizon Services Corp., and Cellco Partnership (dba Verizon Wireless), stand accused of assisting subscribers to download and share pirated music, by not doing enough t
  
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• Italy Reconsiders Nuclear Energy 35 Years After Shutting Down Last Reactor

  16-07-2024 03:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to revive Italy's nuclear energy sector, focusing on small modular reactors to be operational within a decade. He said that nuclear energy could constitute at least 11% of the country's electricity mix by 2050. Semafor reports: Italy's energy minister told the Financial Times that the government would introduce legislation to support investment in small modular reactors, which could be operational within 10 years. [...] In Italy, concerns about energy
  
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• Microsoft Unveils a Large Language Model That Excels At Encoding Spreadsheets

  16-07-2024 02:50 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has quietly announced the first details of its new "SpreadsheetLLM," claiming it has the "potential to transform spreadsheet data management and analysis, paving the way for more intelligent and efficient user interactions." You can read more details about the model in a pre-print paper available here. Jasper Hamill reports via The Stack: One of the problems with using LLMs in spreadsheets is that they get bogged down by too many tokens (basic units of information the model processes).
  
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• OW2: 'The European Union Must Keep Funding Free Software'

  16-07-2024 02:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans.OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopar
  
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• Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott Thinks LLM 'Scaling Laws' Will Hold Despite Criticism

  16-07-2024 01:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're
  
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• FBI Has 'Gained Access' To the Trump Rally Shooter's Phone [UPDATE]

  16-07-2024 00:44 via news.slashdot.org
  
  UPDATE 7/15/24 3:05 p.m. EDT: In a press release published this afternoon, the FBI said they "successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks' phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices." The bureau added that it has completed its search of the subject's residence and vehicle, and "conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses."Original Story: July 15, 16:45 UTC: Investigators are working to break into the phone of the man
  
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• Nation's Last Morse Code Station Comes Back To Life On Annual 'Night of Nights' In Point Reyes

  16-07-2024 00:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  On July 12, 1999, the last Morse code message was sent from a Bay Area radio station, marking the end of an era. Every July 12, the Historic KPH Maritime Radio Receiving Station in Point Reyes revives the golden age of maritime radio, with volunteers exchanging Morse code messages worldwide. The Mercury News reports: Friday's "Night of Nights" event, which commemorates the long-gone stations and the skilled radiotelegraph operators who linked ships to shore, starts at 5:01 p.m. -- precisely one
  
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