ICT news

• Trump Says He'd Oppose CBDCs, Pardon Ulbricht, and Create a 'Strategic National Bitcoin Stockpile'

  27-07-2024 23:45 via politics.slashdot.org
  
  Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a number of cryptocurrency-related pledges.
  In a speech which lasted for over an hour, the 78-year-old former president also criticized his political opponents, touching on topics like inflation, immigration, and his promise to "drill, baby, drill." But he also made several announcements specifically about cryptocurrency:
  Trump promised that if elected, he'd commute the sentence of Silk Road creato
  
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• Fracking for Heat: A New Source of Clean Energy?

  27-07-2024 21:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Southern California Edison — one of America's largest power companies — will buy power from 7-year-old fracking startup Fervo, reports the Washington Post.
  "But instead of oil and gas, Fervo is hunting heat, a more abundant resource that neither pollutes the air nor contributes to global warming."The heat will fuel a new type of power plant: an enhanced geothermal plant... [C]onventional geothermal power plants capture steam from natural underground hot springs in places such as Icel
  
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• 29 Felony Charges Filed Over 'Swat' Calls Made By an 11-Year-Old

  27-07-2024 20:44 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Law enforcement officials have identified the criminal behind "more than 20 bomb or shooting threats to schools and other places," reports CNN.
  It was an 11-year-old boy:Investigators tracked the calls to a home in Henrico County, Virginia, just outside Richmond. Local deputies searched the home this month, and the 11-year-old boy who lived there admitted to placing the Florida swatting calls, as well as a threat made to the Maryland State House, authorities said. Investigators later determined
  
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• NASA's Mars Rover Detects 'Building Blocks of Life' in Rock

  27-07-2024 19:44 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Scientists working with NASA's Perseverance rover state emphatically that they are not claiming to have discovered life on Mars," writes the New York Times."But many would regard a rock that the rover just finished studying as 'Most Likely to Contain Fossilized Microbial Martians'..."The rover has drilled and stashed a piece of the rock, which scientists hope can be brought back to Earth in the coming years for closer analysis and more definitive answers. "What we are saying is that we have a p
  
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• UK Plans Wind Energy Expansion with New Government-Owned Energy Company

  27-07-2024 18:44 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The U.K. government "will substantially increase offshore wind investment in the next five years," writes long-time Slashdot reader shilly — "in partnership with the Crown Estate (a public corporation that owns land including the coastal seabed on behalf of the monarch)."
  It will do this via its new state-owned energy generation [and investment] company, Great British Energy. The new approach includes ensuring grid connections are in place, and is in tandem with changes to the UK's plannin
  
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• How A Cheap Barcode Scanner Helped Fix A Company's CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs

  27-07-2024 18:34 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the Register:Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards. That knowledge nugget became important as the firm tried to figure out how to respond to the mess CrowdStrike created, which at Grant Thornton Australia t
  
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• Elon Musk Will Discuss $5B Tesla Investment in X's 'Grok' Chatbot Company xAI

  27-07-2024 17:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Elon Musk recently posted on X.com that his satellite internet service Starlink is now operating on over 1,000 aircraft — and "is now active in a Gaza hospital with the support of the United Arab Emirates Israel." But on Tuesday, Musk posed this question to his 191 million followers on X.com:"Should Tesla invest $5B into xAI, assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors?"xAI — the Musk-helmed artificial intelligence company — built the Grok chatbot for ov
  
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• Lakes Aren't Just Drying Out. They Might Also Be Releasing More CO2

  27-07-2024 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  As part of a team exploring Utah's Great Salt Lake, climate researcher Melissa Cobo "discovered more disturbing evidence that dried-out lakes are a significant source of carbon dioxide emissions," reports the Washington Post.
  But more disturbingly, they write that this source of emissions "has not been included in the official accounting of how much carbon the world is releasing into the warming atmosphere."
  In a new study in the journal One Earth, the researchers calculated that 4.1 million ton
  
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• Adobe Exec: Early Termination Fees Are 'Like Heroin'

  27-07-2024 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from The Verge: Early termination fees are "a bit like heroin for Adobe," according to an Adobe executive quoted in the FTC's newly unredacted complaint against the company for allegedly hiding fees and making it too hard to cancel Creative Cloud. "There is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously" in the order flow without "taking a big business hit," this executive said. That's the big reveal in the unredacted complai
  
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• Boeing Starliner Astronauts Have Been In Space Six Weeks Longer Than Originally Planned

  27-07-2024 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: Boeing Starliner is apparently still stuck at the ISS, six weeks longer than planned due to engine troubles. The root cause seems to be overheating. NASA is still hopeful that they can bring the two astronauts back on the Starliner, but if not apparently there is a SpaceX Dragon craft docked at the station that can get them home. This is another in a long list of high profile failures by Boeing. This comes after a series of failures in their popular comm
  
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• NASA Fires Lasers At the ISS

  27-07-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and
  
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• 'Copyright Traps' Could Tell Writers If an AI Has Scraped Their Work

  27-07-2024 05:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: "copyright traps" developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark t
  
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• Crooks Bypassed Google's Email Verification To Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services

  27-07-2024 03:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google's "Sign in with Google" feature. [...] Google Workspace offers a free trial that people can use to access services like Google Docs, but other services such as Gmail are only available to Works
  
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• Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone At the Border

  27-07-2024 02:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  On Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison ruled that cellphone searches at the border are "nonroutine" and require probable cause and a warrant, likening them to more invasive searches due to their heavy privacy impact. As reported by Reason, this decision closes the loophole in the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have exploited. Courts have previously ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine war
  
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• Nvidia's Open-Source Linux Kernel Driver Performing At Parity To Proprietary Driver

  27-07-2024 02:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia's new R555 Linux driver series has significantly improved their open-source GPU kernel driver modules, achieving near parity with their proprietary drivers. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: The NVIDIA open-source kernel driver modules shipped by their driver installer and also available via their GitHub repository are in great shape. With the R555 series the support and performance is basically at parity of their open-source kernel modules compared to their proprietary kernel drivers.
  
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• How a Cheap Barcode Scanner Helped Fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs In a Flash

  27-07-2024 01:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards. That knowledge nugget became important as the firm tried to figure out how to respond to the mess CrowdStrike created, which at Grant Thornton Australia threw hundre
  
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• RFK Jr. Says He'd Direct the Government to Buy $615 Billion in Bitcoin or 4 Million Bitcoins

  27-07-2024 01:03 via news.slashdot.org
  
  US presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced during his keynote Friday at the Bitcoin Conference that he would direct the US government to buy Bitcoin until the size of its Bitcoin reserves matched its gold reserves. At current prices, that equates to $615 billion worth of gold. RFK Jr. said: "I will sign an executive order directing the US Treasury to purchase 550 Bitcoin daily until the US has built a reserve of at least 4,000,000 Bitcoins and a position of dominance that no oth
  
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• White House Announces New AI Actions As Apple Signs On To Voluntary Commitments

  27-07-2024 00:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  The White House announced that Apple has "signed onto the voluntary commitments" in line with the administration's previous AI executive order. "In addition, federal agencies reported that they completed all of the 270-day actions in the Executive Order on schedule, following their on-time completion of every other task required to date." From a report: The executive order "built on voluntary commitments" was supported by 15 leading AI companies last year. The White House said the agencies have
  
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• Data From Deleted GitHub Repos May Not Actually Be Deleted, Researchers Claim

  27-07-2024 00:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Researchers at Truffle Security have found, or arguably rediscovered, that data from deleted GitHub repositories (public or private) and from deleted copies (forks) of repositories isn't necessarily deleted. Joe Leon, a security researcher with the outfit, said in an advisory on Wednesday that being able to access deleted repo data -- such as APIs keys -- represents a security risk. And he proposed a new term to describe the alleged vulnerability: Cross F
  
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